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Class JSJiiai 
Book Il_3 



PRESEXTCD m 



OUR FAITH IN GOD 



OUR FAITH IN GOD 

THROUGH JESUS CHRIST 

FOUR APOLOGETIC ADDRESSES 



BY 

J? ERNEST DAVEY 

M. A. (Cantab.), B.D. (Edin.) 

PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
GENERAL ASSR:\IBLY's COLLEGE, BELFAST 
FELLOW OF king's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN CO. 

1922 






J 



First published, September k^iq. 
Second Impression^ November 1922 



QJFf 



Printed by Turfibull &^ Spears 
dt Edinburgh in Great Britain 



OCT 17 '23^ 



Foreword 

THE four addresses which follow were 
delivered at a conference held in Belfast 
during January 1922 by the Student Christian 
Movement and the Irish Christian Fellowship. 
In the form of answers to four common 
questions they attempt to outline and defend 
the Christian view of God, and to set forth 
the more obvious of its implications for life. 
Written as they were for a conference concerned 
very largely with Irish problems and affairs, 
they are, at points, decidedly topical in treat- 
ment ; but all such references will, I think, be 
found by the readers to be easily susceptible 
of translation into forms suitable to quite 
other environments. The aim of the writer 
throughout has been practical rather than 
theoretical, and these addresses are offered 
to the public, not as a considered statement 
of systematic apologetics, but as the attempt 
of an individual to deal positively, and un- 
theologically, so far as possible, with some of 
the more persistent doubts in the general 
mental atmosphere of our day. 

Belfast, January igzz 



TO 

MY PARENTS 



Contents 



Foreword 

Question I : Is it Reasonable 

Question II : Is it Necessary ? 

Question III : Is it Effective ? 

Question IV : Is it Final ? 



Page 

5 
9 

43 

11 
io8 



The First Question: 
Is it Reasonable? 

INTELLECTUALLY, the modern world is 
very much aHve ; everything men beHeve 
is being placed under the microscope, and 
not least religious beliefs, the very importance 
of which, as concerned with the fundamental 
problems of the universe and the ultimate 
issues of life, has led to an exceptional interest 
in the questions of religion, and above all of 
the Christian faith. Not a few to-day within 
the Church, or on its borders, are greatly 
concerned about the shaking which the Christian 
systems of the past have recently undergone, 
by reason of the literary and philosophical 
criticisms that modern and scientific inquiry 
and discovery have brought to birth, and by 
reason of the social and practical challenges 
thrown out by modern industrial and political 
movements and by the cataclysm of the 
greatest of the world's wars ; and we are all 
more or less in a position of intellectual un- 
certainty about many things which our fore- 
fathers took for granted, or believed without 
any great trouble. 

I have, therefore, chosen for my subject 
to-day the question — Is the Christian concep- 
tion of God reasonable for the thought of 
man ? I would say here, before I proceed 
to answer it, that throughout these addresses 



10 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

I am speaking for myself, not for the Church 
Catholic, in what I shall say, though at the 
same time I venture to hope that my views 
will, on the whole, represent the Christianity 
of educated and serious men to-day ; at any 
rate a sincere view in which I shall, as far 
as possible, avoid controverted points, is the 
best thing I can give to this audience, or to 
anyone. 

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY " REASONABLE " ? 

Coming then to my subject — Is the Chris- 
tian conception of God reasonable ? — we must, 
before we can attempt seriously to answer 
this question, ask and answer two prior 
questions : 

(i) What is the Christian conception of 
God ? and 

(2) What is to be understood by the word 
" reasonable " ? 
Let us take the latter first. Now I do not, 
of course, believe that any faith of a religious 
or moral kind can be demonstrated accord- 
ing to the methods of mathematics ; for all 
attempts to locate and define for the purpose 
of accurate thought and logical proof break 
down when we touch upon the unseen and 
infinite world with which we are inevitably 
concerned in our religious and moral ideas. 
Faith is a concrete thing in most of its bearings ; 
the exact sciences are the most abstract things 



IS IT REASONABLE ? ii 

we know. Only in the sheer abstraction of 
sciences such as Geometry or Algebra is any- 
thing like absolute consistency and irrefragable 
demonstration attainable, and that at the cost 
of creating such irrational symbols as, for 
example, the square, root of minus one ; in 
the concrete matters of practical life, to which 
faith in its true sense belongs, the most we 
can attain to along this line of reasoning is 
probability. Therefore, I do not propose to 
essay the folly of attempting to show that 
the Christian idea of God can be fully com- 
prehended and established in terms of our 
petty human logic, and of our vague and cir- 
cumscribed human knowledge. What I shall 
seek to show is that the Christian belief in 
God is more satisfactory to the human mind 
than a denial of it, more satisfactory, that is, 
to the judgment of the whole personality with 
its varied faculties of thought — logical, in- 
stinctive, intuitive, aesthetic, and practical. 

Faith in the sphere of religion is, to my mind 
(as Dr Hadfield has suggested), the counterpart 
of hypothesis in the sphere of science ; it is 
an interpretation of the world, seen and unseen, 
upon which we base our lives and our practice, 
and by which progress in character or in society 
becomes possible. Faith is not sight ; it is 
not certainty, but venture — venture upon the 
unseen in response to the deepest voices of 
the soul ; it is staking one's all upon a certain 
construction of life which has commended itself 



12 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

to us as the most satisfactory open to our 
judgments. Christian faith is simply the best 
interpretation of this life and this universe 
that we have at our disposal — the interpreta- 
tion which has come to us in and through 
Christ ; and in spite of all the difficulties which 
surround the questions of such a faith, we know 
it to be largely a self-evidencing thing. As 
men we are called upon, not only to think, but 
to act ; we must choose our actions, and 
therefore as intelligent men we must choose 
further the principles of our actions, and of 
our lives generally. These principles embody 
our faith, no matter what label we may put 
upon ourselves in matters of religion ; and I 
hold that in Christianity we have the most 
satisfactory w^ay of life, as tested and examined 
by any or all of man's faculties, the most satis- 
factory of all the systems of principles of action 
held by or known to the race of man. Once 
our choice of Christianity as a faith has been 
made, indeed, we are in a fair w^ay to prove 
it reasonable in a far truer and more convincing 
way, by verification of its practical truth, by 
finding that it works ; and thus our faith, 
beginning in a judgment and a choice of a 
somewhat uncertain kind, grows strongei' and 
clearer as our beliefs are established and our 
ventures justified by their works. But that 
greater question of practical verification belongs 
to my third address ; here I am concerned with 
the abstract question of the reasonableness of 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 13 

our Christian thought of God, and I shall aim 
at showing that Christianity in this respect 
is not only not unreasonable, but inherently 
more reasonable, than any substitute for it. 
Beyond that point I do not think man's thought 
can go in the abstract. Faith is never ex- 
changed for knowledge, except subjectively, 
and, despite all the labours of theologians to 
put Christianity on a logical or theoretically 
convincing basis, I do not believe God ever 
permits man's thought to remove life from the 
plane of trust, venture, and self-surrender 
to that of a comfortable certainty. It is not 
in comfort, but in effort, whether of mind or 
body, that character is wrought and salvation 
attained, either for ourselves or others ; our 
only assurance is that which we may win 
for ourselves by a faith which without works 
is dead, a living practical attitude of trust, 
venture, and self-abnegation. 

Passing now from this pragmatic conception 
of faith as the true heroism, and from the 
modified reasonableness which alone can be 
predicated of any faith, I come to the second 
and more important of the two questions I 
raised earlier — What is the Christian conception 
of God ? 



THE FACT OF GOD 

Here there is a great variety in the answers 
which clamour for our attention, but I shall 



H OUR FAITH IN GOD 

try to give an answer which will have a more 
or less uncontroversial form. It is sometimes 
said that a simple statement of the faith is 
the best argument for it ; and certainly such a 
statement will largely answer the question of 
its reasonableness, with which I am primarily 
concerned to-day. Hence I shall discuss side 
by side the two chief questions of the content 
and the reasonableness of the Christian faith in 
God. 

Christianity is the following, or better, the 
attempted following, of the Christ, Jesus of 
Nazareth ; and this following must be thought 
of in two ways — as a following in thought 
and as a following in conduct. If we seek to 
have the mind of Christ, and if we seek to do 
the works of Christ, we are Christians. That 
which entitles us to be called by the historical 
name of Christ is that we aim at reproducing 
in our own lives the thoughts or mind of 
Christ — His values, His principles. His con- 
ceptions, His mental attitude to God and 
man — and the works or active life of Christ — 
His selflessness. His trust. His wisdom. His 
courage. His love. His moral passion. The 
Christian conception of God belongs to the 
first class ; to have it, is to have the mind of 
Christ with regard to God, and to that point 
I now turn in detail, that I may point out what 
Christ's thought of God actually is, as recorded 
for us in the New Testament. 

In the first place, Christ shows no doubt about 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 15 

the fact of God. All His thought, in all its 
ramifications, centres round one who is called 
" God." In Christ's own day, and in our day, 
we find some who profess no belief in God, 
or who even profess disbelief in Him. Is 
this primary idea of God reasonable ? — that 
is our first question. There are some to-day, 
seemingly honourable and intelligent men, 
who call themselves Atheists, Agnostics, and the 
like. What of them ? Well ! their number 
is not in itself great in any age, and these 
men represent largely the difficulties of in- 
tellectual specialists, arising from abstraction 
and the loss of mental proportion, together 
with a following for their negative views from 
among social and intellectual rebels. On the 
whole, their existence is fairly enough explained 
by the almost inevitable reaction against the 
almost inevitable mis-statements of believers. 
The exorbitant claims of authority and of 
ecclesiasticism generally beget such honest 
doubters in every age, and a less honest doubt 
also swells their ranks ; but neither in numbers, 
nor in moral and intellectual quality, is this 
section of mankind of very great moment. 
Believers in God have always had the great 
mass of mankind with them, and usually the 
ablest and noblest men too. The problem 
in itself goes back to immemorial antiquity, 
and is no new discovery of the modern man ; 
and the negatives of a few have never com- 
mended themselves to the great body, either 



i6 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

of the uneducated or of the educated. It 
is important, however, to realise at this point 
the difference between denying the name and 
denying the reality. Few of the ablest and 
most comprehensive and constructive thinkers 
in any community have been deniers of a God ; 
but taking those who do exist, we must dis- 
tinguish between their theoretical rejection 
of the idea of God as expressed or defined by 
past or present theologians, whether scholarly 
or popular, and their practical acceptance 
of those things which God actually is — that 
is, those conceptions which the word " God " 
stands for. 

Many men will accept the obligations of 
truth or unselfishness, for example, without 
realising that truth is God, and love is God, 
and that to call these things principles is only 
another way of consigning them to the unseen 
world, and of declaring that that unseen world 
is the standard of the seen. The man who 
will follow truth wherever it may lead him 
is worshipping God in the most real sense ; 
the man who will face discomfort and danger 
for the sake of a stranger is offering to God 
the most genuine homage, and both alike 
are declaring their faith implicitly, if not 
explicitly, in the one ultimate reality which 
actually includes goodness, truth, beauty, 
power, love, and all the other things which 
we truly value. If we accept these things as 
our ultimate guides in life, we must be theists, 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 17 

or polytheists ; and theism is surely the more 
rational and reasonable ! But to follow any 
of these ultimate values is a partial worship 
of and confession of God, and the truest 
worshipper of God is a follower of them all. 

Again, the belief in God is more reasonable 
than a disbelief, for this reason in particular, 
that it stands for the unity of all those things 
which we value as ultimate ; i.e. it denies 
polytheism even in its most specious form. It 
is more reasonable that our values should be 
related, that they should have a common 
source, than that they should be unrelated and 
derived from varying sources ; i.e. it is more 
reasonable to have one God than many. In 
our actual lives these values have a relation 
and a unity which it is surely reasonable that 
they should have also at their source. The 
ideals, principles, values of man belong to an 
unseen but most real world, and the idea of 
God simply stands for the unity of man's 
aspirations and the unity of their satisfac- 
tion. The idea of God makes of this unseen 
world an intelligible system, a coherent cosmos ; 
the denial of God (I use the word, of course, 
in its barest sense) makes of it a chaos, and 
leaves us in the darkness. It is reasonable to 
find unity in our ideals, as we find it in nature 
about us, and for this unity we use and need 
the word " God." 

But above all — and I do not use the phrase 
in a merely pantheistic sense — God is the All, 

B 



1 8 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

the great social fact which binds together all 
life, as well as all thought, into a unity. We 
all admire unselfishness, and the philosophy 
and practice of the altruist. But what is 
altruism ? It is a setting of the alter^ the 
other, " the not-self,'' above the self in this 
life. " God '' is, after all, a better and a 
simpler word than " the not-self," in referring 
to this unity to which man surrenders the 
self; and in one point at least the idea of 
God is manifestly an improvement upon the 
category of the " not-self '' as a fundamental 
and moral conception, inasmuch as God, the 
All, includes the self as well as " the not-self." 
We all believe that even the self has claims 
upon us ; it is that part of the All with which 
we have most to do, and it has a positive social 
value as well as its negative egoistic tendencies. 
We believe in a self-development which does 
not injure others and which is not " selfish " ; 
that is, the self has a real place, not as the centre 
of our universe, but as a unit in it, with which 
in actual fact we have more to do than with 
any other similar unit. It is our egoism which 
is wrong, our self-centred living, and when for 
self we put as our ideal, not the " not-self " 
of philosophy, but the All who is God, we find 
our difficulties solved, for in doing our duty 
to the All we shall do the best even by our- 
selves, since the All includes all the parts. 
The idea of God is, then, the simplest means 
of expressing our moral ideals, whether we 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 19 

call ourselves theists or atheists ; and in the 
last analysis among sane and right-living men 
and w^omen there are no atheists. To be God- 
centred instead of self-centred is the greatest 
of human achievements, and it is the life of 
Christ. 

Thus we see that God stands for all that we 
value in life — aesthetic, intellectual, moral, 
spiritual, physical, social, and so forth ; and 
no other w^ord can so fitly and adequately 
express the unity of human values as this, 
which connotes the source and substance of 
all that makes life worthy. It is theological 
conceptions of God that Atheism and Agnos- 
ticism are out against, not the ultimate values 
of truth, beauty, goodness, social unity, and the 
like, for which the word stands ; and when 
I use the word " God " I am referring to this 
prime fact of the universe, to the source and 
substance of all our principles and ideals, our 
faculties and powers, our personalities and 
social relations, and to their organic unity. 
And if anyone quarrel with the assumption 
of unity, I need only point out that the 
scientist is quite as emphatic about the unity 
of nature as the Christian about the unity of 
God, and the two mean much the same thing, 
vsdth this advantage to the latter view that 
it regards the unity as being both intelligent 
and moral, as well as physical, such being the 
unity which we know in our own experiences. 
But it is far more important to worship that 



20 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

which God is, and to surrender self to a com- 
prehensive altruism of a practical kind, than 
to pay lip homage to a word. The sceptic 
is sometimes a truer worshipper of the living 
God than those who are glib in their use 
of His name. 

Now the consciousness of Jesus Christ, so far 
as we can interpret it, is primarily occupied 
with this fundamental reality of human life, 
the God to whom belongs all power, all 
wisdom, all life, and all that life has or does — 
in short, Christ's relation to God is an im- 
mediate relation to the unseen and its powers, 
in which self is lost, and the unseen God is the 
centre and substance of life. Such a life is the 
affirmation of God, it is God's life ; and the 
divinity of Christ is the Church's interpre- 
tation of the life of the supreme Mystic 
who has taught us that " he that will lose 
his ' self,' the same shall keep it." Salvation, 
thus, is the loss of egoism, the merging of all 
self-interest in this God who is All. 



THE PERSONALITY OF GOD 

But this God is not for Christ a power, a 
thing, but a person. It is here that many 
to-day find their greatest difficulty ; they 
can admit God as an impersonal something, 
a force, or an energy, or even a treasury of 
moral principles, but to them personality 
appears, not as a unifying, but as a dividing 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 21 

conception — as that which separates man from 
man. I think they are the victims of a wrong 
method of analysis or abstraction, and if, 
instead of removing from their conception of 
God, as they do, the things they find in man 
(as though they could most satisfactorily 
get back to God by the method of exclusion)^ 
they were to keep these things, and all that 
instinctively, intuitively, aesthetically, intellect- 
ually and practically they regard as of value 
in human life, and carry these things back to 
God as their source and cause (i,e. the method 
of inclusion)^ they would be nearer to a reason- 
able conception of God. Surely God is not 
less than man ! And the things to which we 
attach ultimate value are the most likely 
to belong to ultimate being. For where else 
did these things come from — our unselfish 
impulses, our aesthetic joys, our hunger after 
better things, spiritual, mental, or physical, 
our powers of body and mind ? Surely water 
has not risen above its own level ! Surely 
these things come from somewhere in the 
universe, some fount of life and life's goods, 
some directing intelligence pouring itself into 
life as we know it ! It is more reasonable to 
believe that these things have come from God, 
and belong to God, than that they come from 
nowhere, have made themselves, or that the 
higher goods of life are to be explained by the 
lower. Such a view is an inversion both of 
our values and of our sense of congruity. 



22 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

But the things we most value belong to per- 
sonality, therefore the idea of God is not a 
denial of personality, or of those things we 
value in personality, but stands for perfect 
personality (of which ours is but a shadow), 
and for the source of all these things we value, 
and even of our power to value them. Our 
own intelligence demands intelligence in the 
world, both as the explanation of itself and 
of the ordered cosmos as we see it ; our sense 
of beauty drives us back on an ultimate source 
both of beauty and the power to appreciate 
it ; above all, our moral and spiritual quests 
with their unfulfilled aspirations carry us far 
beyond ourselves, for they do not register what 
we are, but prophesy what we may become. 
These elements in life lift our minds to some- 
thing infinitely higher than ourselves, yet 
akin to us — the source of our aspirations, and 
of the enthusiasm to embrace and pursue 
them, and of the power to accomplish them. 
When we speak of God as a person, then, we 
mean that He possesses all that we possess 
of real value and more — intelligence, feelings, 
will, personality, and so forth, and that He 
is the source and explanation of our possession 
of these things; in other words, that we are 
made in His image. 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 23 

THE LOVE OF GOD 

But, to go a step further, this personal God 
is by Jesus Christ regarded as good. Goodness 
is our chief value in life, and once we admit 
the personality of God we must admit His 
goodness. No human mind has ever taken 
seriously the thought of God as evil. If He 
be a machine He might be regarded as neutral — 
and the conception of God as morally neutral 
is bound up in a belief in his imperson- 
ality — but if He be personal, He must be 
good. Just as surely as we value the goodness 
of man, so surely we value the goodness of 
God, and find in the latter the source and 
rationale of the former. But goodness is a 
word admitting of many degrees, and for the 
perfect goodness of His perfect personality the 
best word is that which implies for us the 
highest form of goodness we know, i.e. Love — 
the selfless conception of life which involves 
sacrifice, benevolence, trustworthiness, service, 
and altruism generally ; and this is the way in 
which Christ speaks of God ; He refers to him 
habitually as Father. The very noblest and 
tenderest elements in life are used to interpret 
the unseen God ; nor is this unreasonable, 
for these things must have their source some- 
where in that great unseen and still uncom- 
prehended storehouse, which some speak of 
as Nature, but which is God. All fatherhood, 
all love, all affection and unselfish concern, 



24 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

are but a shadow of something greater, the 
unseen Love which called us into being, 
and in unselfishness maintains and directs our 
ways. Jesus has taught us to say '' Abba, 
Father " into the seeming darkness and silence 
round about us. The message of the Father- 
hood of God is perhaps the greatest gift He 
brought to man, though it is not the only one, 
and to this love of the All- Father Christianity, 
following the spirit of Christ's teaching, rather 
than the letter of apostolic or other records, 
has learned to put no limits. It is for Christ 
no mean haggling relation of mutual interests, 
but a limitless ocean of divine passion, concern, 
and care. 

*^Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt 
love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say 
unto you. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, 
do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which 
despitefully use you, and persecute you ; that you may 
be the children of your Father which is in Heaven : for 
He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." ^ 

The words of Christ are full of such teaching ; 
the long-suffering patient love of God pours 
out its gifts even upon the ungrateful and 
the evil, and those who are His children must 
reflect this changelessness and impartiality 
of true selfless love. Nor is there any stint 
in His love in respect of wasted or misused 

1 Matt. V. 43-45. 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 25 

talents and opportunities. God's disciplines 
may be called for by His love, and exercised in 
love, but once a man has come into the vine- 
yard of God, be the hour early or late, he 
receives equally with all the other labourers 
his penny a day ; he is not " docked " in 
respect of his past ; repentance and obedience 
have cancelled the past, and he is heir to the 
whole resources of the Father. He who cares 
for the sparrows cares for man. He who 
numbers the hairs of our head is acquainted 
with our every need and desire. Such a God 
cares for each one of us more than our parents, 
more than lover, or children, more than we 
even care for ourselves. The measure of our 
self-love, great as it is, is small beside the un- 
measured love which has created and watches 
over us. God will never take an unfair ad- 
vantage of us. He will never wound except 
in love and mercy. He will never despise us, 
nor mock at us ; and to such a love only can 
man give an unreserved trust. It is the 
selflessness of God which takes from Chris- 
tianity all fear and all sting; the realisation 
of the love of God with all its implications 
is life's truest salvation ; and on man's side it 
is gained and maintained only by trust. This 
trust or faith is the counterpart of Christ's 
conception of God ; man's duty is not only 
to accept intellectually the true conception 
of God, but to cast the weight of his life, 
both spiritually and physically, upon it. This 



26 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

attitude of the soul, of acceptance, trust and 
venture, is salvation as preached by Christ. 

"Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we 
eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or. Wherewithal shall we 
be clothed ? But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and 
His righteousness ; and all these things shall be added 
unto you." ^ 

It has taken the Church many centuries to 
learn to think of God even in a measure as 
Christ spoke of Him, but there is no lesson in 
the world more important for either individual 
or social life. '' God is Love " we read in 
I John, and men are beginning to value to-day 
what has been true, though unapprehended, 
since Christ interpreted God to man, viz., 
that His love is the fundamental fact of all our 
lives, and all that exists, and that it is not less, 
but infinitely more than any love of ours, and 
is to be interpreted in terms of St Paul's great 
vision of love. 

" Love suiFereth long and is kind, love envieth not, 
love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not 
behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily 
provoked, thinketh no evil. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, 
but rejoiceth in the truth ; beareth all things, believeth 
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love 
never faileth." * 

That is God. 

In a love like that our minds can find rest, 
and to a love like that our wills can make the 
fullest surrender. God may be, and is, other 

1 Matt. vi. 31-33. 2 , Cor, xiii. 4-8 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 27 

things beside love, but the controlling concep- 
tion of God is, and must be, that of Father. 



THE ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF GOD 

But this love is no mere isolated emotion, 
it is linked up with all the faculties of that 
perfect personality which we call God — His 
mind. His power. His will. His wise and 
gracious purposes. If I may put it so, God 
has a body as well as a soul. What are our 
bodies but the instruments for realising and 
expressing our souPs life ; and if the soul of 
God be love, it has its body or organs of self- 
expression which we refer to under such words 
as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, 
eternity, and infinity, words which may often 
be weak and unsatisfactory symbols of the 
truth, but which express for us the more 
quantitative (as opposed to the more quali- 
tative) aspects of God's being, and the means 
to His self-expression. Christ tells us, in 
words already quoted — and I believe he meant 
it — that not a sparrow falleth to the ground 
without our Father ; He tells us again — and 
I think it is integral to Christ's conception 
of God — that the very hairs of our head are 
all numbered. 

The word " omnipotence " is perhaps the 
most important and the most criticised in this 
connection. God is everywhere known in 
Christendom as the Almighty ; and, while 



28 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

the word '^ omnipotence " has aroused a good 
deal of discussion in the sphere of Christian 
philosophy, with all due respect to some modern 
theologians whose criticisms of the word seems 
remarkably like an apology for the faithlessness 
and weakness of the modern Church, I venture 
to affirm that the essential idea of omnipotence 
is as central to the Christian faith to-day as it 
was to Christ's teaching as we have it recorded 
in our Gospels. Christ's whole gospel, mystically 
conceived and expressed as it is, rests implicitly 
upon the idea of God as the all, possessed 
of all power, all knowledge, all goodness, and so 
forth, and as mediating these things to His chil- 
dren as they need them ; and I believe that He 
is absolutely right. The word " omnipotence " 
is open to many a quibble ; there is no proof 
except experience, and experience can only 
carry us to the belief that in God there is all the 
power that we need. After all, the more physical 
or quantitative elements in our conception 
of God must be explained by the directing 
intelligence behind, and if we believe that God 
possesses all the powers necessary to accomplish 
His will or purposes, that, I think, is all that 
we, as Christians, are required to believe. It 
is not an abstract conception of omnipotence 
that we need, but a belief that between God's 
purposes, small or great, and the means of 
carrying them out, there is no disproportion, 
but a provision in material things for all the 
spiritual needs of the divine plan. This is 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 29 

a practical conception of God's omnipotence, 
which is not open to metaphysical objections 
or dilemmas (such as. Could God make a weight 
so heavy that He could not lift it Himself ?), 
and where it has been tested in Christian ex- 
perience by men of faith it has been proved 
abundantly. The word '^ omnipotence '' may 
cause some difficulties, but I hold that it is 
not only more reasonable to accept it than to 
reject it, but that the root conception is 
fundamental to Christ's thought of God, and 
to ours. '' Soule is forme, and doth the bodie 
make," Spenser sang long ago, and I believe 
that the soul of God, His loving intelligence, 
has created its body of physical and other 
powers, competent to all the demands made 
upon it by the purposes of the eternal Father. 
The gospel of miracle, properly understood, 
is as essential to Christianity as it is actual 
in the life of Christ, and it rests upon the 
power, knowledge, and other resources of God 
as inexhaustible and all-sufficient. Perhaps, 
after all, the words " inexhaustible " or " all- 
sufficient," which are in no way coloured by 
theological use and abuse, are better in this 
connection than the old word '' omnipotent." 
Christ certainly teaches that the power of God 
is equal to any emergency, that our resources 
in Him are always greater than we know, and 
that no unforeseen chance can befall us any 
more than the birds of the air. Man may fail 
to put himself in line with the purposes of 



30 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

God, but he cannot interfere with those 
purposes themselves. This nerveless, doubting 
and feeble age is, in many quarters to-day, 
seeking to explain away its failures in faith by 
emphasising the difficulties of the conception 
of God which Jesus preached to men, but 
personally I believe that this very thing which 
they question is the faith that overcometh 
the world, the secret of Christ's own life and 
miracles so-called, and of the power of His 
personality upon His own and subsequent 
ages. But it is none the less the clearer vision 
of our age which is producing such doubt as 
its first, though not its final, offspring ; this 
age is really nearer to the Kingdom than those 
which are gone, and the conscious darkness is 
the prelude of the dawn. Out of weakness 
we are made strong, and the doubts of honest 
men are often the foundations of faith, since 
such doubt is but a groping after truth, the 
challenge of tradition by a sincere mind with 
a vision of something better. In the doubt but 
reality of our age the way is being prepared for 
a greater faith, as men are coming to compre- 
hend the true meaning of faith, and to realise 
that allproof and assuranceare subjective things, 
won, not in reasoning, but in venturing. 



BY WAY OF RESUM^ 

I hold then, as I have said, that it is reason- 
able to believe in a God, a source of all things, 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 31 

and in particular of our values — aesthetic, mental 
and moral. I hold it reasonable to believe 
that this God is personal, otherwdse the highest 
things in life — thought, purpose, affection, 
impulse, feeling, choice and consciousness — are 
left without an explanation ; and if we are 
going to explain things at all, we ought to begin 
with those which we value most — our moral 
principles and aspirations, our sense of the 
value of personality, of the rights of free- 
dom, and the Hke. I hold it reasonable to 
believe that this personal God is good in the 
highest sense, otherwise man is greater than 
God ; for man has at least a measure of that 
goodness and unselfishness which he follows, 
and surely this high vision, unrealised, but 
potent, in man, comes from some source 
that cannot be found in man's lower past ! 
Therefore, I hold it reasonable to believe that 
this God, the God of Jesus Christ, is Love, 
or Father ; and when I find this conception 
freeing, ennobling and empowering life, and 
creating the worthiest character, I feel it is 
more than reasonable, it is true ; and God 
being such, I hold that Christ's way of faith 
is perfectly reasonable. In such a God one 
can trust ; and I know of no case in which 
that trust, once given, has been disappointed ; 
faith has brought its own verification, its own 
assurance and peace, to those who have ven- 
tured upon God without fear, and with a whole 
heart. It is this experimental verification of 



32 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

Christianity, as shown in the New Testament 
records, and in all the biographies of the saints, 
ancient or modern, which is the final proof 
of the reasonableness of Christianity, but it is 
a proof only given to venturing trust in that 
measure which carries conviction. 

Absolute theoretical proof of Christianity 
would destroy the moral value, the spiritual 
heroism, of faith — it would turn it into mere 
prudence — and such proof is not given to men ; 
but a man v/ho will think seriously is led sooner 
or later to see that the presumptions, even in 
theory, are in favour of Christianity rather 
than against it, and, from this evaluation of 
the imperative of Christianity as greater than 
all others, he is led to make that venture which 
shall prove Christianity to himself, and to the 
world. And such faith is no mere selfish 
thing. Every man who tests and proves the 
gospel of God's grace is a benefactor of man- 
kind. In the advance of medicine, of explora- 
tion, of applied science, men have again and 
again taken their lives in their hands for the 
sake of knowledge and of mankind. So it 
is in religion ; men of faith and venture 
will not only achieve their own salvation in 
peace, and power, and knowledge, but will 
bring the world appreciably nearer to the 
same salvation, and to Him who is the Captain 
of it — Jesus Christ the great venturer. What 
does Gethsemane mean, what does Calvary 
mean, but venture ? What do the miracles of 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 33 

Christ, what do the methods of Christ, as 
outHned in the Sermon on the Mount, and as 
practised in relation to the men and women 
about Him, mean, but venture ? — venture on 
God in every sense, and upon that which is 
divine in the human heart. And this venture is 
the great world need to-day, and if the Church 
had more of it — i.e, more testing of its faith 
— apologetic lectures would be little needed ; 
for what men are seeking is not a religion 
theoretically and satisfactorily consistent, but 
one which is practically helpful and self- 
evidencing in its results. 

THE SOCIAL AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS 
OF THIS FAITH 

But Christ's thought of God had always a 
social side to it, or rather, it was fundamentally 
social in its practical meaning ; for correspond- 
ing to the Father were the children, and Christ's 
gospel was the social gospel of the Kingdom. 
I have said before that to a mystic mind God 
always appears in a social aspect as the inclusive 
All, but Christ gives the actual message of 
His gospel an explicitly social form in the 
parables and laws of the Kingdom which He 
founds, so that over against the Fatherhood 
of God is set the brotherhood of men. Men 
are to find their unity in God as His people, 
or Kingdom, but their relations with one 
another are to be the relations of brothers and 



34 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

sisters, in whom self has been denied and God 
affirmed as the ultimate fact in life ; not ego, 
but God, is the centre of the disciples' life, 
and to have attained to that way of life 
is to have entered the Kingdom, to have found 
the treasure in the field, to have discovered 
the pearl of great price ; for love, selfless- 
ness, and brotherhood are the Kingdom, the 
treasure, and the pearl. We have many social 
problems about us — more, we assure ourselves, 
than Christ had, though perhaps mistakenly, 
certainly not many more — but for them all 
the life of Christ still offers to us this one 
solution, the Kingdom, i,e. a new attitude 
or spirit, a new passion or power, which we 
may call brotherhood, or selflessness, or love, 
but which is God, the one great absorbing 
fact of Christ's consciousness, and the resolu- 
tion of all His and our difficulties. God is 
the source of all life and power, and of all 
guidance and wisdom ; and the ethic of Christ 
is an ethic of absolute trust, not in the seeming 
powers of man's might or knowledge, but in 
spiritual and unseen powers released by faith, 
self-surrender and obedience. This trust in 
spiritual realities and power, so evident in 
Christ's teaching, and so counter to our present 
worldly prejudices, is the secret of Christ's 
own life and works and influence. 

But is it reasonable ? George Fox was once 
told that his teaching was not common sense, 
and his reply was, " It is not common sense, it 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 35 

is the Kingdom of God," i.e. — as I understand 
his words — it is uncommon sense. To me, 
personally, these things do seem reasonable, 
judged according to my own experience and 
my own reading of human records past and 
present ; but I know that the illusions of life 
die hard, and I do not believe that I could ever 
establish its reasonableness to the satisfaction 
of the unbelieving critic. Christ's wav has 
not been tried except by individuals. They 
have been extraordinarily successful in the 
verification of their faith, so far as I know their 
stories, but for the world at large Christ's way 
is still a vision, a hypothesis, a faith ; and I 
believe that it is incumbent upon all His 
followers to put it to the test, not only for their 
own sake but for the sake of the world. I find 
it hard not to despise the man who professes 
to follow Christ, and shrinks from even trying 
to put into practice Christ's explicit teaching ; 
far rather would I have the man who thinks 
Christ mistaken, and dares to say so. Sooner 
or later an honest disciple of Christ must face 
the question, " Was Christ a fool, or had He 
a divine wisdom ? '' Up to a point I believe 
the world will concede the reasonableness of 
Christianity ; but there is a point beyond which 
we must as Christians advance in our following 
of Him, where the world will proclaim us fools, 
as the men of His age proclaimed Christ, 
only some day, as I believe, to acclaim us as 
wise men, when their eyes have been opened, 



36 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

and Christ has at last won the approval of the 
world which crucified Him, and which even 
yet understands Him so little. 

The way of faith has been proved in science 
— hypothesis is the way of progress ; it has 
been proved in commerce — the world rests 
upon credit ; it has been proved in social 
intercourse — trust and responsibility succeed 
in drawing out of men what nothing else 
does, or can ; it has been proved in disease — 
the suggestion of health can produce health ; 
it has been proved again and again in religion, 
in the stories of the great souls of Christendom. 
Some of us have proved it in a measure for 
ourselves, and I have never met any man or 
woman who regretted a true venture of faith. 
Have we courage to try it, and to risk our little 
lives and our petty interests for the Kingdom 
of God ? " He that will save his life shall 
lose it, but he that will lose it for My sake, 
and the Gospel's, the same shall keep it unto 
life eternal.'' 



JESUS CHRIST THE REVELATION OF GOD 

Christianity, however, is not a mere belief 
in God. It is a Christian belief in God, i.e. 
belief in God through Jesus Christ. The 
word " God " in itself means little apart from 
a definition of it, and the Christian view of God 
is that which we have found in and through 
Jesus Christ, in His teaching, and in His life 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 37 

and doings. Christ for the Christian is the 
measure of God, so far as we have a measure. 
He is the visible image in the records of history 
of the invisible deity. In all life the unseen 
must be interpreted by the seen ; we cannot 
think in terms of that which has no meaning 
for the concrete knowledge of our senses. To 
interpret God in terms of humanity is certainly 
better than to interpret Him by abstractions 
such as " Spirit," or by any lower category 
of life ; but to interpret Him in terms of 
Jesus Christ, the highest life that this world 
knows, is to form the highest possible idea of 
Him ; and the divinity of Christ, whatever 
its theological content and difficulties, means 
primarily this — that God is like Jesus. In 
other words, when the Christian thinks of 
God, inevitably he thinks of Jesus, through 
whom he knows God. This again is surely 
a reasonable way of expressing the Christian 
doctrine of the person of Christ, without 
raising the various metaphysical and psycho- 
logical problems of the Trinity and the " two 
natures," of which to-day most students, 
even theological, fight shy, and not unnaturally, 
inasmuch as our primary concern must always 
be religion, and not theology, life, and not 
mere thought. It is the personal relation of 
your life towards Jesus Christ, in particular 
towards His mind and works, which matters ; 
not your theory of His relations with God. 
I would not depreciate theology, but, after 



38 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

all, our primary needs are the spirit, the values, 
the mind of Jesus Christ, as our surest and best 
approach to the unseen God with whom faith 
has to do. Religion for Jesus Christ is God, 
and that is why Christianity for us is Christ. 
I am not concerned here with other and second- 
ary problems and doctrines, but with Christ's 
mind on the subject of the invisible God ; 
I would focus all our attention upon this one 
point, in the belief that in the doctrine of 
God we have the whole of Christianity — all else 
is its implication and outcome. That is, if 
we can only attain to a vital and active faith 
in God — trusting, resting, venturing upon 
Him, giving Him thus free course to express 
Himself in us, looking upon all things in the 
light of His character and purposes, and losing 
all egoism, and all the fears and paralysis of 
egoism, in a perfect surrender to His will 
and to the concerns of His kingdom — then 
Christianity has given us all that it can, and all 
that we need. If we have the life, we can 
dispense with the theory of it as an essential, 
though we shall still find it a help, above all 
in expressing our faith to others. But a life 
centred in, and preoccupied with, the God of 
Jesus, has the whole secret of Christ and His 
Kingdom ; and it is for such lives that the 
world to-day is inarticulately calling, not for 
theology and its apologetics, but for a life which 
is its own apologetic. 

Is such a life reasonable ? If we have 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 39 

accepted the theory which underlies it in the 
Christian conception of God, we must accept 
the Hfe itself in practice, or be branded as the 
associates of Pilate, the man who was afraid 
to act according to his judgment of truth, 
and so crucified the world's best friend, and 
thereby has become a byword for cowardice. 
I know that there is a point beyond which 
the ordinary man is afraid to go ; he will 
accept as much of Christianity as he can 
without difficulty combine with his ordinary 
non-Christian principles in politics, business, 
and social life, but this compromise soon 
strangles even the element of Christian faith 
actually accepted. Christianity has, on the 
whole, lifted the world, not through its prac- 
tical politicians, but through its men of vision, 
who, for the most part, left the practical 
politics to the God in whom they trusted. 

THE PRACTICAL ISSUE 

The real question is not so much — " Is 
the Christian belief in God reasonable ? '' as 
— " How much of it is reasonable ? " and 
there no man can shirk the responsibility of 
individual judgment. But one thing is to 
me evident from the page of history, viz., 
that the best, and most helpful, and most 
triumphant life is that which has been fullest 
of God, and has approximated most nearly 
to the interpretation of Christ, and that the 



40 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

uniqueness of Christ's own life stands or falls 
by its uniquely full and developed conception 
of God. 

Judged, then, by its theory or its practice, 
its coincidence with man's aspirations, or its 
issue in goodness, individual or social, the 
Christian conception of God is surely a reason- 
able conception ! But is it equally reasonable 
to all men ? Expressed in Western forms, 
it is reasonable to the Western mind, but is 
it reasonable to the Eastern mind in this 
Western dress ? Partly, no doubt, but mis- 
sionaries are assuring us to-day that the East 
must make its own interpretation, or inter- 
pretations, of Christianity if it is to find its 
own Gospel, its own interpretation of Christ 
in particular, and of God as realised through 
Him. The East has not as yet contributed 
its quota to the theological explication of the 
Christian faith, or to the concrete practice of 
the Christian life. The wise men of the East 
have yet to lay their treasures at the feet of 
Jesus Christ, that the prophetic vision of the 
Nativity story may become an accomplished 
fact ; and what is true of the East is also true 
of other parts of the globe, where the Christian 
mission has not yet planted firmly its feet. 
In other words, I do not believe that the 
Christian Gospel, and the Christian conception 
of God, which is its core, can be universally 
reasonable to the thought of man, till they 
have been universally known, and universally 



IS IT REASONABLE ? 41 

stated ; and that day of promise is only dawn- 
ing. To the mission work of our Church we 
must look for the coming of a greater age, 
when the knowledge of God shall indeed cover 
the earth as the waters cover the sea, and when 
Christianity shall be able to make a universal 
appeal which shall be as reasonable as it is 
universal. But theorising and argument will 
never, of themselves, convert mankind. Life's 
problems are practical, and theory untested 
will carry us nowhere ; faith is to be proved, 
not in the study, but in life, not in dialectics, 
but in venture, and there is no possible sub- 
stitute for the active faith of trust and self- 
denial, by which the soul of man and the 
society of men alike may be saved. 

If we will only lean our full weight upon 
Christ's conception of God, we shall have the 
best possible proof, the only satisfactory proof 
of the reasonableness of our faith. Christ's 
teaching is not always easy to understand, it 
is full of " hard sayings " regarding God, 
and regarding those who are made in His 
image. The world and the Church have been 
afraid of it ; they have paid an extraordinary 
lip service to Christ, that they may escape the 
true service of imitation and obedience ; they 
have set Him apart from themselves, that they 
may feel free to set aside His teaching as too 
lofty for them ; they have changed the mean- 
ing of faith, not once, but often, that they 
may escape from that venture without which 



42 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

it is dead. But the one thing we know is, 
that they have failed^ and men to-day are 
beginning to reaHse that there is a connection 
between the Church's failure to do the works 
of Christ and its failure to reproduce the mind 
of Christ as regards God and man. As a 
church, we are beginning to feel that Christ's 
way is worth trying, and to understand, though 
dimly, that Jesus Christ was right after all, 
and that, even tested timidly in a small way, 
His programme works and His spirit triumphs. 
Modern methods, more in harmony with 
Christ's mind, in education, in social reform, 
in domestic politics, in international relations, 
and in our individual and collective life 
generally, are proving themselves to-day to 
be true ; but they can only prove themselves 
when some one is found with courage to try 
them. Shall we dare to follow Christ, and, 
for the sake of the world and the Kingdom of 
God, to test and to prove His way of life, and 
His message of the Father on which it rests ? 
God grant it. 



The Second Question: 
Is it Necessary? 

YESTERDAY I spoke of all Christianity 
as contained explicitly or implicitly in 
the Christian conception of God. The whole 
structure of Christian faith, in theory and 
practice, in individual and social relations, 
is to be found in the conception of God as 
revealed in and by Christ. When I ask, then, 
if this conception of God be necessary for 
human life, I am really asking if Christianity 
is necessary. A man's idea of God is a con- 
fession of his w^hole outlook in life, of his 
values, his ideals, his hopes and fears, and his 
realised resources ; and the Christian conception 
of God is, therefore, simply a compendium of 
Christianity. 

Now, is this Christian conception of God, 
which we have seen cause to believe reasonable, 
necessary ? We all believe in hundreds of 
things as reasonable, which have no direct value 
or necessity for us, and it is further possible, 
as I shall have occasion to point out to-morrow, 
to believe a thing reasonable without believing 
it true. I believe it reasonable to hold that 
Mars is inhabited, but I do not yet know any- 
thing which makes the belief necessary for me, 
nor do I know anything which demonstrates 
it to be actually true. Theoretical reasonable- 
ness is not enough to accept regarding Christ's 

43 



44 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

view of God, and men know well that three 
further questions will, and must, be asked : 

Is it necessary ? 
Is it true ? 
Is it final ? 

ITS NECESSITY FOR THOUGHT 

First, is it necessary for thought — intel- 
lectually necessary ? Men have often tried to 
prove that the belief in God was logically 
necessary for man's thought, and the history 
of theology has given birth to four great 
arguments for the existence of God, which aim 
at showing that the conception is necessary ac- 
cording to the constitution of human thought, 
i.e. that it is the necessary explanation of 
things as wx know them. I shall not dwell at 
length upon these arguments, but briefly they 
are these : — 

The first is the cosmological argument from 
cause and effect, which carries the human mind 
up a chain of causes to a first cause — an un- 
caused cause. The second is the teleological 
argument, which starts from the evidences of 
purpose and design in the ordered world 
around us, both external and inward, and carries 
the human mind back to a directing, arranging, 
and purposing intelligence. The third is the 
ontological argument, which starts from the 
bare conception of God itself, and attempts 
to show that the idea or ideas concerned are 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 45 

necessary and self-evidencing for the human 
mind, as an integral part of human thought ; 
the fact of God, the unity of God, the perfection 
of God, are claimed to be the implicit standards 
of our thought, and imbedded in our thinking 
all the time, whether realised or not. The 
fourth is the moral argument, based not on 
pure but practical reason, which starts from 
the moral sense of man, the sense of obligation 
and of moral ideals or goals, as arguing a God 
who is the creator and governor of the moral 
order, of our sense of its reality, its demands 
and its objectives, and of the power to attain 
moral ends. 

But the attempt to prove the doctrine of 
God intellectually necessary has not been 
able to prove it logically or mathematically 
so. In all our proofs there is a gap ; faith 
may jump it, as hypothesis in science, but 
it is there. The idea of causation itself is, 
since Hume's day at least, a faith ; but the 
postulating of a first cause, while not necessary 
in a purely logical scheme, is necessary at least 
in this sense, that only so can our minds find 
rest or satisfaction in the survey of the inter- 
minable chains of apparent causes and effects. 

The argument from design or purpose is 
inevitable in the case of those who find design 
and purpose at every turn in their own thought, 
and, whether the belief be a projection of 
oneself or not, we cannot think sanely apart 
from it. It is not logically necessary to hold 



46 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

tluiL arrangement and adaptation of means to 
ends argue intelligence, but only so can the 
mind feel satisfied. TJie mind of man in- 
stinctively knows tliat cosmos is sane, and chaos 
incongruous, belief in God reasonable, and 
atheism absurd. A man can actually be 
sophisticated by abstraction and specialisation 
into discussing, and even under contradiction 
championing, the possibility of all the harmony 
and arrangement and mutual fitness of tilings 
being accidental coincidence ; but no one 
believes it, and the teleological argument for 
God in some form or other is tlie belief of all 
sane minds. Here again our faith is not 
absolutely necessary as logic, but is practically 
necessary to satisfying our minds. 

M'Jie ontological argument is peculiarly weak 
logically, but very strong aesthetically or in- 
tuitively ; logically an idea cannot prove 
itself, but tcsthetically the idea of unity amid 
all the diversity with which our minds are 
distracted, the idea of perfection amid all the 
imperfection, error and failure which comprise 
our experience, and the idea of absolute and 
immutable being behind all the flux of things 
and all the relative interdependences of life 
in which no stability or terra firma is to be 
found, give to our minds a feeling of rest and 
satisfaction, for which, for some good reason, 
nature has made them cry out. The onto- 
logical proof, then, if not logically convincing, 
meets and fits a need in our natures which 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 47 

nothing else can ; it is in so far necessary to 
thought, and in some form or other it appears 
in every attempt theist, agnostic, or atheist 
to understand and interpret life and nature. 

In his great criticism of these three earlier 
proofs for the existence of God, Kant attacks 
their logical necessity, and on the whole shakes 
it seriously, but he fails to note that their real 
cogency is the aesthetic or intuitive satis- 
faction which they bring. They clear up 
our mind, satisfy its unrest, and meet its 
fundamental gropings after truth in a way 
which no other conceptions do. But the 
strangest commentary upon Kant's criticism 
is that furnished by his own great argument, 
the moral, which he thought to substitute 
for the earlier three, but which he only added 
to them. For here too there is no logical 
necessity for a proportion between ideal and 
attainment, between obligation and ultimate 
being or ultimate success. Kant himself has 
here taken a jump, to which he has been urged 
by an aesthetic sense of the ultimate fitness of 
things, an intuitive, not a logical, compulsion 
of his thought ; that is, he himself stands where 
his opponents stand, not on logic, the super- 
ficial systematised knowledge of the conscious 
mind, but on something deeper and most 
insistent, the ultimate values of sanity, pro- 
portion, and " right reason " (as the Stoics 
called it). 

Let us then admit at once that, if we use 



48 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

^' logic" in the sense of mathematical demon- 
stration, our conception of God is not logically 
necessary, but it does appear to be necessary 
in a deeper sense, for harmony and peace of 
mind and satisfaction of the depths of our 
aesthetic and moral natures, and this peace 
seems to be requisite to practical usefulness. 
The atheist and agnostic have merely truncated 
and partial conceptions of God, not unified 
but chaotic, not systematised but isolated 
and fragmentary, but God none the less. 
The man who denies God, but talks of nature, 
means God ; the man who talks of moral 
principles means God ; the man who talks 
of aesthetic values means God ; for the con- 
ceptions of nature, of principle, of value, are 
merely conceptions of the unseen, without 
unity, system, or cosmos ; in other words, such 
a man has a poorer, less regulated, and less 
organised theism. Even in articles by agnostics 
I have read explicit admissions of their own 
failures to think without introducing God in 
some form ; in other w^ords, the reality of 
the conception of God, leaving aside its form, 
is necessary to our thought ; and that necessity 
is not the superficial necessity of abstract logic, 
but the deeper necessity of concrete life, with 
powers and visions all eluding our definition, 
but finding in the thought of God satisfaction 
and peace, and, through its unifying, systematis- 
ing and clarifying influence, a greater power 
for practical concerns. It is men of positive 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 49 

faith wlio do things in this world, and so the 
conception of God is necessary to give our 
minds that measure of satisfaction and peace 
in which alone positive work can be accom- 
plished efficiently and well ; that is, its necessity 
is not theoretical, but practical. 

The Christian faith in God is necessary in 
measure for the thought of all men, and in a 
full measure for those who would make much 
of life in its length and breadth. The better 
the life, the more necessary is a full and de- 
finite conception of God ; and for the best 
life, the life of Jesus Christ, the idea of God is 
everything. 

So far, I have attempted to show that the 
Christian conception of God is necessary for 
the satisfaction, peace and harmony of man's 
intellectual faculties ; it alone can give him 
that rest of mind which enables him to direct 
his energies from speculative problems, that 
hinder his usefulness owing to the disharmony 
of his mind, to the practical problems of life. 
This fact is written large on the page of history. 
The reason why philanthropic or other practical 
service of mankind has been rendered chiefly 
by believers, is, that their minds have been 
at peace, and so enabled to give all their 
energies to external problems, in place of wast- 
ing them in inward debate and the torture 
of dim questionings. For a useful life con- 
structive thinking is necessary, and constructive 
thinking is not possible to any large degree 



50 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

till a man has found mentally some rest for the 
sole of his foot, some foundation which does 
not require to be relaid every few minutes. 

Thus the conception of God is not only 
reasonable, but necessary, for the best life, 
as the condition of practical usefulness and 
power. The believer stands on a rock from 
which he can help others ; the unbeliever in 
a bog from which it takes all his efforts to save 
himself. I am not condemning honest doubt, 
which is a stage of most sincere thinking ; but 
an indefinite continuance of the doubting stage 
is certainly not a blessing but a curse. Doubt 
may free a man from wrong conceptions, and 
enable him to attain better ; but a long 
continuance in doubt means paralysis of life, 
disharmony of personality, and destructive 
habits of thought which warp and enfeeble 
life in every aspect. The challenge of doubt 
is often a blessing ; but the acceptance of 
doubt is a morbid mental condition, the 
condition of a man who has thrown up the 
sponge. Positive thinking can rest nowhere 
but in God, and for a useful, self-evidencing 
and worthy life some vital conception of God 
seems to be necessary. 



ITS NECESSITY FOR HEALTH OF MIND 
AND BODY 

But mental peace has other sides to it which 
are also of importance. In the first place, 



IS IT NECESSARY? 51 

peace means mental and physical health ; 
dispeace, distraction, and worry mean ill- 
health ; and here we come to one of the 
most striking of the values of faith in God 
as tested in life. Let me first say that the 
word " necessary/' applied to the conception 
of God, must be taken in the same sense as 
in other connections. For example, food is 
" necessary," but a man need not eat, and might 
live for a considerable time without food ; 
i.e. " necessary '' does not mean '^ compulsory," 
but only " required for continued and satisfy- 
ing life." Viewed in this way, we find the 
Christian idea of God necessary in relation 
both to inward life and to outward activity. 
A sceptical writer, in an article I read some 
time ago, admitted that unbelief w^as hard ; 
and stated his conviction that, if the term of 
life were indefinitely prolonged, men would 
sooner or later become believers or madmen. 
That is, he believed that between unbelief 
and insanity there stood only the brevity of 
life, and that disbelief in God could not main- 
tain itself, but must cause mental breakdown. 
It is an interesting admission, and one which 
seems true as tested in actual fact, viz., 
that not merely for mental peace, but for 
mental health, which rests upon that peace, 
faith is essential. The proof is quite obvious 
on all hands. The issues of ill-health for 
an invalid are largely determined by his 
confidence or optimism. Far more people are 



52 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

killed by loss of faith than hy infection or injury. 
Optimism is always faith, sometimes explicit 
and realised, sometimes implicit and intuitive 
only, faith in the ultimate goodness in some 
form, which is at bottom faith in God. For per- 
manent physical health the belief in God, above 
all in Christ's form of it, is all-important. For 
mental health the same belief means ultimately 
everything. Hence the extraordinary efforts 
which man's reason has put forth to establish 
the doctrine logically and remove it from the 
sphere of faith — unavailing efforts in the search 
after certainty, but most significant, and by 
no means unavailing as providing man with 
a reasonable presumption which makes his 
faith a rational thing. 

But deeper than the mind is the soul, the 
seat of spiritual intuitions and impulses, and 
the source of our moral sense. Here we 
touch the very foundation of our nature which 
manifests itself in our moral judgments and 
moral ideas, immediate things which we can- 
not analyse, but by which our lives stand or 
fall, and by which we are judged every day. 
This inward judge, the conscience, leads us 
at times very close to the mouth of hell, and 
fear seizes upon us, not fear of external punish- 
ment nor of God so much as fear of ourselves, 
horror and remorse at our own past lives 
revealed to us in their moral nakedness and 
truth, and with these things the dread of future 
failure and self-contempt, and we are torn by 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 53 

spiritual dispeace and torment. This sense of 
conviction of sin, which is one of the most 
real experiences in life, and which seems to be 
very much a forestalling in this life of judgment 
and hell, that we may even here pass beyond 
their power, can only be healed — such is the 
witness of religious experience — by confession 
and faith. In confession immoral suppressions 
are removed, and sin brought to the fresh air, 
in which it dies ; but, for the sensitive soul, 
repentance and confession are not enough ; 
they may indeed cancel somehow the guilt of 
sin as a personal thing, but what about its 
effect on others ? It is here that the belief 
in God becomes an essential to the best life, 
and to the healing of the soul, for the Christian 
conception of God is that of a loving and 
omniscient Being, bearing Himself wittingly 
all the responsibility of man's transgressions, 
not merely their guilt, but their consequences. 
Under the w^eight of conscious sin, I know of 
no sure escape for the rational, sensitive spirit 
of man from the burden of responsibility, 
except the way of faith in God, whereby a 
man can roll the burden upon God, in the 
faith that God has actually borne the full 
responsibility of his sin, its guilt, its venom, 
and its consequences. In this way I believe 
faith in God to be necessary to the best life 
on its spiritual side. The Christian con- 
ception of God gives us a Father who cares 
for us even in our sin, and seeks to condemn 



54 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

it and yet save us ; who has foreseen our sin, 
and made the wrath of man to praise Him, 
by putting it into His scheme of things, and 
overruHng it for the purposes of love, so that 
out of evil shall come forth good. 

Christ's teaching of the omnipotence and 
omniscience of God, which encompass even the 
life of the birds or the flowers, is the only 
teaching in which the soul of man, tortured 
by the contact between good and evil in his 
own dual nature, can find spiritual rest. And, 
above all, this conception is true because God 
is the inclusive All ; all our sins against others 
are sins against Him ; all our sins against our- 
selves are sins against Him ; and, if we have 
His forgiveness, we have both our own and 
our neighbour's, whether we or our neighbour 
actually rise to our opportunity or no. It is 
God only with whom we have to do — self 
and the All ; and this simplifies the whole 
question of life's relationships, and makes us 
dependent, not on imperfect and variable 
human nature, but on immutable and perfect 
goodness. So we can say, in the words of the 
Psalmist : 

" Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned," ^ 

since our relation to God implicitly includes 
and overrides all other relationships. Thus 
the conception of God simplifies life, while it 

1 Ps. li. 4. 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 55 

strengthens and purifies it. It is the Hfe of 
God against which all sin is directed, and the 
individual relationships are only the points 
in which our relation to God is found and 
expressed. " If a man loveth not his brother 
whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
whom he hath not seen ? '^ Christ's concep- 
tion of God is thus the solution, not only of 
our intellectual, but of our moral and spiritual 
problems, and is necessary to the full and 
healthful development of our lives in all their 
aspects. It was because Luther had found 
peace, and so found his feet set upon a rock, 
that he was able to do what he did for the 
world. Peace gave him power, it freed his 
energies for practical service, and it brought 
to him that harmony of mind which is the 
condition of the best work, and of the continued 
health of body, mind, and spirit. Whether, 
then, we think of the relation of faith to health 
of body and mind, or of the relation of internal 
harmony to usefulness and constructive work, 
or of the relation of the sense of a full for- 
giveness, which truly cancels the past, to a 
developed and free spiritual activity of life, 
we see at each point how the conception of 
God given to us by Christ is the foundation, 
and the only satisfactory foundation, of the 
best, freest, fullest, and most useful life. 



S6 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

IS IT NOT ENOUGH TO BE A DECENT CHAP ? 

I come now to the less definite, and less 
comprehending, criticism of the Christian 
demand for faith, made, not by serious thinkers, 
but by the ordinary man of the street, who is 
not greatly interested in what is called religion. 
He is not convinced that the Christian belief 
in God is necessary for him, and his scepticism 
appears in such questions as : 

" Is it not enough to be a decent chap ? " 
" Is it not sufficient to play the game ? " 

These are, of course, serious questions, and quite 
sensible, at least at first sight ; but a very little 
criticism will show us how hopelessly super- 
ficial the view which they take of life actually 
is. We cannot so easily get rid of the factor 
of environment as these questions would sug- 
gest, an environment in which the Christian 
conception of God has been one of the most 
creative agencies for good ; and the questions 
really embody a great illusion for the most 
part, though in some cases of their use they 
stand for the much more vital question : 

" Is not Paganism really superior to 
Christianity ? " 

Let me illustrate the first point by reference 
to the Deistic movement in the eighteenth 
century. In that movement we have the 
setting up, over against Christianity, of a so- 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 57 

called Natural Theology, which, it was held, 
was the normal belief of the unwarped human 
mind, a belief in a good God — in reward and 
punishment according to moral choices, in im- 
mortality, and the like. A fairly strong and 
able school of thinkers decried Christianity, 
and exalted their new teaching, which they 
believed to be but the true belief of unso- 
phisticated human minds. But the movement 
petered out — and why ? Because it had no in- 
dependent existence ; it was a parasite living 
on Christian faith and influence, which had 
created an environment impregnated with the 
conceptions of God and of spiritual things. 
Natural Theology was a great illusion, a ghost, 
a shadow of the Christianity around it ; and 
its partisans assumed that what they found in 
their Christian environment was not Christian 
in origin, but merely human. It was a great 
and instructive mistake, and one which was 
soon discovered when the real challenges of 
materialism and agnosticism w^ere launched 
against the Church in the century which 
followed. Natural Theology was an incomplete 
and depotentiated Christianity. And when 
men to-day speak of " playing the game," of 
being " a decent chap," and the like, they are 
thinking in terms borrowed largely from our 
Christian, or at least semi-Christian, environ- 
ment, created originally by Jesus Christ's life 
and influence, and directly by the Church 
which professes to follow and interpret Him 



58 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

to men. The unconscious debt of the " decent 
chap '' to Christianity is very obvious to any- 
one who will analyse his life and standards 
of conduct, for these rest upon institutions and 
systems of ideals created largely by the Chris- 
tian consciousness of the past. I take it that 
" decent chap " is only a more colloquial way 
of expressing " good man/' though one is 
tempted to think that the phrase refers often 
to complaisant good nature, so called, which 
avoids all that is unpleasant, rather than to the 
real goodness with moral backbone, which refuses 
the line of least resistance. But those who ask 
whether it is not enough to be a decent chap, 
mean, on the whole, a man who does his duty 
and takes no mean advantage of his fellowmen, 
that is, a good man in the ordinary meaning 
of the word. Unfortunately, the phrase is 
weak in its power of connoting character, as 
the word " decent " is so vague. 

But taking it as it stands, '^ Is it sufficient 
to be a decent chap ? " Must not a man aim 
at being the most decent chap possible ? In 
other words, if there are grades of " decent- 
ness,'' is it not necessary to the best life to aim 
at the highest ? When a man says " it is 
enough to be a decent chap," he means, I 
think, that he can get the most out of life by 
such '' decency " of life. If you could prove 
that he failed to do so, I think it would be 
obvious that the choice of that level of life 
was a lower choice, and so self-condemned ; 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 59 

and that, to get the most out of, and mto, life, 
it was necessary to be more than a decent 
chap, to be, in fact, the most decent chap 
possible. 

And so the question may be an unconscious 
rebuke of modern Pharisaism, as though the 
questioners said, " You are going to get to 
Heaven cheap, by the repetition of certain 
formulae, which you have learned to utter 
and believe in. But we are not made that 
way. We cannot believe in your formulae. 
Will it not do if we are decent chaps ? " Here, 
then, we have a pathetic hope that, not merely 
by dogmas, but by goodness also, men may climb 
the heights of Heaven ; a hope that is surely 
akin to the spirit of the gospel of Jesus Christ, 
and infinitely nearer the actual truth than 
the alternative suggested ! 

However, to go back a step, I have pointed 
out that the idea of a " decent chap," for most 
of those who use it in a Christian environment, 
means something very close to the Christian 
ideal, of which it is only a reflection or more 
unsubstantial ghost. But I wish now to point 
out that to be a Christian is to be the 
most decent chap possible, and that the 
Christian conception of God, of which all 
Christian ideals and character are implications, 
is, therefore, necessary to the best life possible 
to us ; and to choose consciously anything 
less than the best is the great ultimate treason 
to humanity. The Christian ideal of character 



6o OUR FAITH IN GOD 

is found in Jesus Christ, and is that character 
which is built on, springs out of, and embodies 
in human hfe the Christian conception of 
God. Jesus Christ bids His followers, in the 
Sermon on the Mount, imitate the love, and 
patience, and thoughtfulness of God, that 
they may be the children of their Father which 
is in Heaven ; and for the Christian all his 
goodness is the imitation and offspring of the 
character of God as interpreted by Christ. 



CHRIST THE IDEAL OF MANHOOD 

The Christian character revealed in Jesus 
is the noblest and fullest' possible to man. 
In Him we have the greatest love and self- 
denial known to man, a love that stooped to 
the lowest depths even for utter strangers ; 
the greatest humility and allowance of the 
rights of others ; the greatest freedom and 
independence as against the traditions, or 
the might, of others ; the greatest courage, 
physical and moral, where danger or misunder- 
standing had to be faced ; the greatest self- 
control ; the greatest sincerity ; the greatest 
sense of justice, and of mercy triumphing over 
justice ; the utmost faith in men and women ; 
in a word, all the classical virtues, with others 
distinctively Christian which belong to His 
own world-challenging gospel. 

There is not a shred of evidence to impair 
our estimate of His courage, His righteousness, 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 6i 

His self-control, His freedom ; and to these 
virtues of the Hellenic ideal He has added 
those which raise the Christian far above it — 
love and humility which knew no bounds, and 
which shrank from no self-expression as too 
menial or degrading. The pride of Hellenic 
ethics, the hard justice of Roman ethics, are 
overborne and condemned for ever by the love 
that stooped to the dust, and the humility 
that bore all things, because God Himself was 
such according to the view of Christ, patient, 
unfaltering, enduring love, that knew no 
respect of persons. The ethic preached and 
practised by Christ according to our gospel re- 
cords is the greatest human history has known ; 
and if it be so, it is surely necessary to the 
best life, the life revealed in Christ and by 
Him made possible for man ! And inasmuch 
as the ethic of Christ is explicitly bound up, 
as in the Sermon on the Mount, with the 
character of God, we see that the Christian 
conception of God is necessary for anyone who 
would make the most of life, and get and give 
the best in the span of this short pilgrimage. 
Surely we may say that Jesus Christ is the 
decentest chap — to use, not irreverently, the 
phrase with which I have been concerned — 
the decentest chap we know of ; and that to 
be a decent chap on some other level is not 
sufficient, if it is possible, by taking Christ's 
mind about God to ourselves, to be a decenter 
chap still on a higher level ! When a higher 



62 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

and lower are put before us, to choose the lower 
is to choose the evil, and with it, to choose hell 
in some sense. If Christianity be to you a 
higher thing than your own life as a " decent 
chap," then you must choose it, or fall under 
the condemnation of your God and your own 
conscience, which cannot be hoaxed into 
satisfaction with a second-best, and which will 
accuse you all day, and all your days, as a coward 
and a traitor to the highest. But perhaps you 
do not realise that Christ does stand so far 
beyond you, along the line of practical life. 
Perhaps you know little of Him one way or 
the other ; perhaps you think He w^as a mere 
dreamer ; perhaps you have got a wrong 
conception of Him. 

As to the first point, ignorance about Christ 
is hardly excusable in an age and environment 
like this, and I can only advise you to change 
it for knowledge. As to the second point, if 
He was a mere dreamer. His castles in the air 
have grown their ow^n foundations, and His 
dreams have fufilUed themselves in so many 
ways that one is driven to think they are more 
probably the reality, and our vaunted common 
sense a dream, nay, a nightmare. As to the 
third point, it is easy to get a wrong idea 
of Christ, and Christian art and literature has 
a good deal to answer for in their painting 
of " the pale Galilean " with his weak and 
effeminate aspect ; but that is merely mediaeval 
misrepresentation, and, as George Bernard 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 63 

Shaw has said, " ' Gentle Jesus, meek and mild ' 
is a snivelling modern innovation, with no 
warrant in the gospels." The healthy young 
carpenter of Galilee, who dared to court death 
in cold blood, who faced the misunderstandings, 
not only of His enemies, but of His friends, who 
purged the temple, and flouted the ecclesi- 
astics, who dared to set His own thought of 
God above the sacred text, and to criticise 
freely both the religious and social presupposi- 
tions of His age, at the cost of a short and stormy 
ministry and a shameful death, who championed 
the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, against 
the leaders and the prejudices of respectable 
society, and dared to disappoint to the utmost 
His own nearest and dearest relations, disciples 
and friends — He was no weak man in any sense, 
but the embodiment of a perfect courage, 
often tried, but never failing. The legend 
of the effeminate Christ must not be allowed 
to stand betw^een a man and the best of lives. 
Christ does indeed seem to have the strength 
of woman as well as of man, but He is the 
ideal of manhood, no matter at what point we 
touch His life as known to us. To know 
Christ is to-day an obvious duty, and to know 
Him means a choice between Christ and self, 
between good and evil, which cannot be 
evaded by any talk of being a " decent chap." 
To many men the phrase in question appeals 
because of its actual vagueness, while Jesus 
Christ's demands are clear and definite, but, 



64 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

once the real issue has been faced, a man must 
either admit that his conception of a " decent 
chap " is Jesus Christ, or is on a lower level. 
Vagueness is of no use here, and we have to do 
with a definite personal choice — '' What think 
ye of Christ ? '' Keep your ideal of the " decent 
chap " if it means being like Christ, but if it 
means something less than the best, an ideal 
more easily attained than that offered in Christ, 
you condemn yourself as coward and as traitor 
to the best you know, as the associate of Judas 
and Pilate, and the other trimmers of history, 
who have chosen amiss and been pilloried by 
the conscience of the world. In Christ you 
will find the perfect life, the denial of selfish- 
ness and of the easy downward paths of life, 
and the scaling of the heights of God in the 
service of others ; and the secret and centre 
and source of this life is God Himself. The 
mind of Christ about God is thus necessary 
to the best life ; all the moral values of all 
earth's religious or ethical systems are found in 
Christ and His thought of God, around which 
His life revolved ; and in His intellectual 
sincerity and fearlessness, and in His aesthetic 
and utterly unascetic joy in life, and that 
appreciation of earth's beauties which is en- 
shrined for ever in His parables and teachings, 
we find the same spirit and the same com- 
pleteness of life. This God-centred life of 
Jesus Christ is our perfect example, not indeed 
in the letter which killeth, but in the spirit 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 65 

which giveth life ; and if we would follow Him 
in the life we must follow Him in our thought 
of the God behind it. 



IS IT NOT SUFFICIENT TO PLAY THE GAME ? 

But another says, " Is it not sufficient to 
play the game ? " Practically all the arguments 
I have used already apply here too. To 
" play the game " in a Christian environment 
probably is no more than a vague statement of 
the Christian ideal unconsciously borrowed ; 
and, if " playing the game " were defined, it 
would often be very little different from 
practical Christian life as generally understood ; 
but there are some things which one might 
say further with reference to the alternative 
proposed. In the first place it is extra- 
ordinarily vague, and seems to refer to the 
English public school spirit, and to conventions 
regarding the sportsmanlike playing of cricket, 
and so forth. " It's not cricket " is, in fact, 
another form of '' It's not playing the game." 
The game to be played at all must have rules, 
and the moral value of the phrase will depend 
on these rules ; and it is not the written laws 
of the game that are in question, but the 
unwritten laws, embodied in an English ideal 
of games, which is largely the product of 
a semi-Christian environment, and which, 
therefore, consists largely of Christian prin- 
ciples. All life is a game, and the real 



e(> OUR FAITH IN GOD 

question is, " What are the best rules, the 
truest and most worthy ? '' ; and I submit 
that, in the game of Hfe, the rules of the 
Christian, the unwritten principles of his 
playing, are better than any other set. Here 
we are reduced again to the Christian ethic 
as superior to other ethics ; and, if a man by 
'' playing the game " simply means playing 
the best of games in the best possible way, 
then I believe that this is no true alternative 
to Christianity, but a synonym for it. 

However, if a man uses the phrase as an 
alternative — and to ask whether it is necessary 
to be a Christian, and necessary to accept 
the Christian doctrine of God, in this particular 
form, " Is it not sufficient to play the game ? " 
suggests that there is actually a felt difference 
between Christianity and ^' playing the game " 
— ^he may mean that Christianity asks far too 
much in the way of acceptance of doctrines 
and the like, while he only wishes to be a good 
man and to do the best with his life, i.e. he 
has an objection to something theological or 
institutional in the Church, and in particular 
objects to accepting a metaphysical definition 
of God. Or again, it may mean that he has 
a fundamental antipathy to something in the 
Christian morality, and is at heart a pagan 
with a real grievance against Christian views. 

Let us take the former case first, that of 
the man who is afraid of dogmas, has a healthy 
objection to the acceptance of metaphysical 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 6^ 

phrases, which neither he nor any one else 
fully understands, and has the sincerity to 
desire that he shall profess nothing which he 
does not hold. His view is, of course, right, 
but he is mistaken in identifying Christianity 
or the Church with such dogmas as the essentials 
of the faith. The day is gone when dogmatic 
metaphysics are required of laymen. Clergy- 
men, authorised to teach, must study and be 
interested, to some extent, in such things, 
and are expected to appreciate the dogmatic 
systems of past Christianity ; but the ordinary 
Church member to-day need not take much 
stock in dogmas, for the Church has realised 
by now that Christianity is a way of life, 
not a theology, a way of life with a bare 
minimum of intellectual system. It is not 
possible to have a definite point of view 
in regard to life and conduct at all without 
some intellectual statement and comprehension 
of it ; but the amount of metaphysics required 
to qualify for the name ^^ Christian " is so 
small as to be practically negligible. The 
chief thing in Christianity, the chief test of, 
and qualification for, the name '' Christian " 
lies in the attempt to follow Christ. Following 
Christ is not a thing of external acts, but an 
adoption of the mind of Christ, and in so far 
dogmatic in measure, both as regards God 
and man ; but I have attempted in my last 
address to give a statement of Christian belief 
with a minimum of speculative doctrine, and 



68 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

to show that the Christian faith is in essence 
a certain attitude towards all that exists, or 
the universe. So this objection, in the case 
of most men who push it, falls to the ground ; 
to be a Christian is to " play the game " in the 
truest sense, and does not really mean the 
addition of an uncomprehended and unneces- 
sary creed of a dogmatic or speculative kind. 
True Christianity is just as concrete, and just 
as little dogmatic, as the ideal of '' |>laying the 
game,'' indeed it is that ideal in other words. 
To " play the game '' you must have your defi- 
nitions, rules, and so forth, and there is no real 
difference philosophically between the following 
of Christ and " playing the game,'' except that 
the former is less vague, and therefore more 
directly concrete and helpful, than the second. 
The sporting spirit is simply another name 
for faith, as I defined it yesterday. Faith is 
the great adventure, the great gamble, the great 
romance ; and Christianity means the best 
playing of the best game ; and the rules of the 
game are those which we call the ethics of 
Christianity, found in the life of Jesus Christ, 
and founded upon the character of God which 
Christ preached. 

THE CHALLENGE OF PAGANISM 

But we come now to the second, and more 
serious, case of objection, the case of the man 
who asks if it is not sufiicient to play the 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 69 

game because he feels that Christianity asks 
what it has no right to ask ; the man who 
has some deep-rooted antipathy to Christian 
ethics, and an open or a secret preference for 
a more pagan code. Let us admit at once that 
there is a serious element of fact to be faced 
here. It is not long since a prominent writer 
classed the English public school system as 
pagan and not Christian by reason of its ideals ; 
and there are those who really prefer the 
English public school ideal of " playing the 
game," as the game is played there, with all 
its political, social, and ethical presuppositions 
— and these are not few — to the Christian ideal. 
We come here to the tYtr present challenge 
of paganism under the forms of certain pre- 
judices or values, which we may class under 
the headings of a limited, and especially an 
imperialistic, patriotism, of aristocratic pre- 
judices, and of a morality of egoistic pride. 

" Playing the game " for many means a 
life given to the support of the British Empire, 
and the Christian refusal to look at any unit 
smaller than mankind is disliked ; for such 
men internationalism and world brotherhood 
are in the second class of ideals as compared 
with British prosperity and the ascendancy 
of the Anglo-Saxon. For many, again, 
" playing the game " means loyalty to a 
class, with the belief that a benevolent aristo- 
cracy is better than the untutored and 
undisciplined democracy of the world as we 



70 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

know it. The high ideals of feudal chivalry 
in the upper classes are prized as earth's greatest 
way of life, and the poor and ignorant are to 
be governed and exploited for their own good 
and the good of the world. The Christian 
insistence upon the equality of men as potenti- 
ally, if not actually, true, is disliked, because 
of a genuine conviction, no doubt, that men 
are actually unequal, and that control ought 
to be in the hands of those who are educated, 
and have had the leisure to acquire high ideals. 

For many, again, '' playing the game " 
means keeping an unbroken and independent 
spirit under all circumstances, to save one's 
face, one's egoism, one's self-respect, one's 
pride. The Stoic ideal of man as rex or king ; 
the Indian brave laughing at his tormentors, 
all the quintessence of that human pride that 
will not suffer itself to be humbled is a religion 
to not a f ew ; and it is a strong and noble 
religion, but not the strongest, not the noblest ; 
it is weak in its self-esteem, and in the fears 
which egoism brings with it ; and Christ's 
example of humility and willingness to be ill- 
treated, and of power to feel with and for men, 
and yet to be unbeaten, is hated, partly because 
it is misunderstood, partly because it is feared, 
as all high ideals are by those who will not 
accept them. 

Well, Christianity does not deny the good of 
patriotism, but, granting all its positives, it 
denies its negatives ; it teaches that patriotism 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 71 

should unite, and not divide ; it does not deny 
the good of aristocratic ideals and education, 
it only asks that they be extended to all men ; 
it does not deny personal strength and inde- 
pendence of external things, but it denies 
egoism and its fears, and teaches that the 
true independence springs from dependence 
on the unseen God, and that true strength is 
in the humility which is strong enough to 
stoop to any service v^ithout thought of shame. 
We have here the antithesis betv^een egoism 
and altruism, between pride and humility, 
in their various forms ; and this pagan 
challenge of our modern school system, resting 
as it does on European militarism, must be met 
in the boldest way by a denial of its lirnited 
caste sympathies and its limited self-sacrifice, 
and by a proclamation of the higher laws of 
a higher game. Militarism, oligarchy, pride, 
suspicion, and the like, are prejudices born^ of 
a pagan standpoint, i.e. are a pre-Christian 
set of values, but the coming of Christ, and of 
a universal kingdom, knowing no ultimate 
distinction in country, colour, caste, status, 
or the like, has put them out of date ; and 
their following is a deplorable atavism, a putting 
back of the hands of the clock. And why are 
they wrong ? Because Jesus came preaching, 
beheving, and living by a better conception 
of God, not a national deity, not a divine 
ordainer of caste, not a blind force demanding 
of man a Stoic impassiveness, but a Father, 



72 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

whose children are all mankind, before whom 
class, national, and colour distinctions fade into 
nothingness, and who withal in selfless love, 
or self-giving, stoops to the uttermost, and 
calls us to a like spirit. The character of 
Jesus Christ springs out of the character of the 
unseen God ; and all our highest morality 
and life are the implications of our Christian 
conception of God. 

Paganism, Hellenic, Stoic, or modern, is 
not without its nobility ; but in the light of 
Christianity it is darkness, it belongs to a 
lower order of things, and is doomed because 
the Christian conception of God is to-day 
necessary to man's best playing of the best 
game. Yes, our ideal is God interpreted in 
Christ ; and the pagan objection is the 
objection of the reactionaries who would 
stem the world's progress, or of those whose 
knowledge of Christianity is inadequate and 
misleading. " Playing the game " will un- 
doubtedly be attained best as an ideal by 
embodying in our lives the spirit and mind 
of Christ about the unseen and the seen. . 



THE CLAIM OF THE CHURCH 

We come, then, to the conclusion that 
" to be a decent chap " and " to play the 
game " either mean Christianity or something 
less than Christianity ; in either case we see 
the necessity of Christianity for the best life. 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 73 

To call the lower ideal good means nothing ; 
for the good is often the enemy of the best, 
and, if in Christianity we have a better, it 
alone is truly good for us, since all good and 
evil are relative things. It is not enough 
to juggle with vague phrases, even though 
they sometimes represent a healthy reaction 
against a morbid pietism ; we must be clear 
about these matters. The issues are : Shall 
we be the best, or less than the best open to 
us ? For the best life — and no other is worthy 
of consideration by " decent chaps " who 
wish to " play the game " — Christianity is 
necessary, i.e. Christ's mind about God and 
men, and the way of life in which it found 
its natural expression. 

So we see that for satisfaction and peace 
of mind, for stable and enduring mental health, 
for quietness and power of spirit, for practical 
efficiency, and for the fulfilment of the noblest 
ideals of man, however conceived, the religion 
of Jesus Christ, His mind and His works, His 
faith and His way of life, are essential things. 
Beside that ideal all else is a second-best 
which is doomed to destruction, and can to-day 
give us neither peace nor power. God known 
in Christ is the one and only satisfaction of 
our needs, and for all true and permanent 
life vitally necessary. May we have grace to 
enter into our inheritance through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. 

Let me, in conclusion, raise one further 



74 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

point : — Is it necessary to belong to the 
Church, in which Christianity is officially 
recognised, and of which the Christian faith 
in God through Christ is the basis and bond ? 
Many to-day, lumping the Church with its 
failure and its shame, which things are but 
by-products of what the Church really is and 
does, wish to have nothing to do with it. 
Let me briefly give you reasons for holding 
it necessary for the best life to join the Church, 
concerning which I may say that I should 
agree with most of your criticisms. 

In the first place, the environment and social 
fellowship of like-minded people cannot be 
dispensed with by any who seek the best 
life. That is one message both of the modern 
psychology and of common sense, and I leave 
it at that. Secondly, the Church stands 
for positive things, it is an instrument with 
definite ideals, and with great potentialities 
for positive service; no free-lance can have 
the same power as a regiment or army ; and 
the Church at the worst is not dead yet, but 
capable of being transformed by good men to 
something better and more useful than it has 
ever been. 

Thirdly, the utter destruction of the Church 
is practically impossible, as it is the cement of 
our social fabric, and its reformation, which 
is practical politics, must, according to the 
evidence of history, almost certainly come from 
within ; therefore if you have any positive 



IS IT NECESSARY ? 75 

enthusiasm for goodness, get in and help to 
change it, rather than stand by and criticise. 
Almost every great religious reformer of the 
Christian era has been a member of the Church, 
and nearly always a minister or official in it. 
Wicklif, Huss, Luther, Knox, Wesley, and so 
forth, these were all official teachers of the 
Church, and they have done most to help it 
to better things. The Natio7ial Dictionary 
of Biography gives an extraordinary, and 
altogether unsolicited, testimony to the posi- 
tive and constructive power of the Christian 
Church, and especially of the Christian 
ministry, in producing great men in every 
branch of human usefulness. The sons of 
British clergymen, for example, are far ahead 
of all others in their percentage of the world's 
great men, and it is almost amazing to note 
how many of the teaching staff of any university 
— take, for example, this of Belfast — are sons of 
the Church's manses and rectories. If you 
want to do the greatest good you can wath your 
life, you will find the Church of help ; and if 
you wish to help the Church, that it may 
once more lay the world under its debt, as in 
ancient, mediaeval and Reformation days, you 
will get into its ranks, and seek its reconstruc- 
tion, so far as you demand it, from within. 
No instrument men ever created has the same 
potencies for positive and constructive work 
in the world as the Christian Church, and for 
good-intentioned and thoughtful men to-day 



^6 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

to follow the line of least resistance by staying 
without it, is to surrender the citadel of 
civilisation to poorer, M^eaker men, and to 
leave it, in a day of great problems, to the tender 
mercies of the most unenlightened and most 
unchristian elements within it. For your 
own sake, for the Church's sake, and for the 
world's sake, keep as closely in touch with it 
as you can, if you would make the most of 
your life ; and let us all aim at making the 
Church a better interpreter and a tru'cr re- 
flection of its divine Author and Guide, even 
the God whom Jesus Christ has declared to us, 
and who is like Jesus Christ. 



The Third Question: 
Is it Effective? 

WE come now to a very practical question 
regarding our conception of God as 
gathered from Jesus Christ. Granted that 
it is reasonable and necessary in theory for 
thought and life, is it actually true ? Does 
it work when tested ? Is it effective in 
practice ? Does it prove itself by results ? 
Is it justified by its works ? The practical 
or pragmatic test of faith is in the foreground 
to-day, since men have realised how imperfect 
and limited is all our thinking, based on im- 
perfect and limited knowledge as it is, and how 
often theory fails to approve itself in practice ; 
and experience is for most people to-day the 
final test. 

VERIFICATION AND VENTURE 

We have here a serious question, though it 
is the question of a weak faith, of a timorous 
mind ; for the obvious answer is : If you 
are a brave man, try it and see. But most 
of those who have not seriously tried it wish 
to have some reasonable expectation of satis- 
factory results before they do so. The con- 
ception has to be tested some time, and its 
author, Jesus Christ, tested it to the full in 
His own great adventure of faith, and because 

77 



78 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

of Christ the way is easier for all who follow 
Him, but still men ask the old questions : — 
Is it true ? Will it bear my weight if I lean 
on it ? There is no final or perfectly convincing 
answer except the answer of experience, and 
that needs courageous and honest men. Sol- 
vitur amhulando. 

You have, in the Christian view of God, 
an interpretation of the universe, reasonable 
and satisfactory for your thought, necessary 
for the best life, tested and proved by Jesus 
Christ, and in measure by countless of His 
followers ; but you still ask for a little more 
persuasion before you risk your all upon it. 
And God is very gentle v/ith the timorous soul ; 
He does not quench the smoking flax, the 
smouldering tinder of our faith. He gives us 
more help than we have the right to expect, 
and, knowing our frailty. He makes the way 
easy for us, as easy, at least, as it can be made 
with a due consideration for our lasting good. 
He shows us as much as love can with safety 
show us, in the way of example and proof, 
but He cannot make our faith sight, or our 
heroism mere prudence, without destroying 
the things which matter most in life. There- 
fore, faith is still venture, and we must have 
courage to take the forward step of faith in 
the unseen but eternal realities of our lives. 
There is a gamble, a venture upon hypothesis, 
a step of heroic faith, in all upward movement 
of life. 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 79 

An egg-collector, scaling the clijffs for sea- 
bird's eggs, found himself once in a position 
from which ascent and descent were equally 
perilous. Some friends lowered a rope, and 
it hung some six inches beyond his utmost 
reach. It was stout, and he could trust 
it ; he could trust his ow^n muscles and in- 
telligence ; but still he hesitated to ju\mp the 
necessary six inches. Why ? Because, though 
the risk was small, it was a life risk. But it 
soon presented itself as practically necessary, 
so he jumped and was drawn into safety. 
It is a parable of life and faith. Everywhere 
we are faced by the jump, small, but in essence 
a life risk ; and being here creatures of a day, 
with work to do and with powers to accomplish 
it, hesitation, if prolonged, br<ands us only as 
cowards. We must jump, we must trust, 
for " He that will save his life shall lose it." 
Kelvin tells us that in his constructive w^ork 
he was always conscious of a chasm between 
his logic and his hypothesis. To reach his 
hypothesis he had to leap in the dark ; and 
by his leaps mankind has been blessed and his 
name has won honour. In all religion, in all 
life, there is the venture to be made ; and 
Christianity is indeed the true satisfaction 
and rationale of the sporting instinct, and even 
of the gambling habit, which is but a meaner 
and more perverted form of the same thing. 
We look for safety before all else ; but stagna- 
tion, decay, gangrene, atrophy, death — these 



8o OUR FAITH IN GOD 

are the rewards of seeking safety first. Seek 
ye first the Kingdom of Heaven^ and all else 
of value shall be added. There is no security 
save in self-sacrifice, self-surrender. Christian- 
ity is Christ, and Christ is our interpreter of 
God ; and the faith that overcometh the 
world is utter faith in God through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. Yet God gives us not a little help 
towards realising both the need and the 
efficacy of such a faith. Let us look at a few 
of these helps in attempting to answer the 
question : Does Christ's view of God work ? 



THE WITNESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

First we see that it was effective, it 
worked, in the life of Christ Himself, the 
author of the Christian faith and the Christian 
experience. The Gospels give us the picture 
of an extraordinary life as lived in the faith of 
God, and in the power that such faith brought. 
Everywhere we find the character of Christ 
as the outcome of His thought of God. His 
fearlessness, physical, moral, and intellectual, 
rests upon His belief in the love and absolute 
providence of the Father. His efficiency and 
powder to help others, with no thought of hunger 
or weariness, or the like, rests upon His surrender 
of all self, and the fears of self, to the love or 
selfless concern of Another, greater and better 
able to watch over His life. His miracles 
are the evident response of a Father's power 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 8i 

to a faith great enough to expect the unusual, 
and openly to challenge God's grace for needy- 
human hearts and lives. His great ventures 
of faith, in His temptations, in His agony, 
in His death, rest upon His faith in the 
purposes, the wisdom, and the overruling of 
the unseen God ; and the Resurrection and 
Pentecost, or the rock of assurance and the 
baptism with power of the early Church, are 
but instances of God's answers to the faith 
of His well-beloved Son. In all points He 
was tempted like as we are, and yet without 
sin, because He knew and cared only for God 
and the things of God. And Christ's faith 
in God was paralleled by an extraordinary 
faith in men, the children made in the divine 
image. 

The phenomenal success of the early Church, 
beginning so inauspiciously in a despised and 
out-of-the-way corner of the world, with a 
message which was a stumbling-block to the 
thought of the day, as it still is in large meas- 
ure, was another remarkable evidence of the 
effectiveness and power of Christ's faith in 
God. Yet, great as was the triumph of early 
Christianity, it seems hardly to have been as 
great as was Christ's vision for it. The 
weakness of the Church in all ages has been 
a great disappointment compared with the 
expectations of its Master ; but the call to a 
better faith is still with us, and we may, even 
in this generation, rise to a vision and a power 



82 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

unknown as yet in the history of the Church — 
if we will. Christ's leaving of His mission to 
die, by drinking the cup He did not under- 
stand, and from which He prayed to be 
delivered if it might be God's will, was the 
supreme venture of a faith which chose death 
rather than life, spiritual vision rather than 
logic ; and it called for some one who might 
continue the work, other than the ignorant and 
misunderstanding Twelve. Again His faith 
was answered in the appearance of Stephen and 
of Paul his greater successor. 

Did Paul's faith in God through Jesus 
Christ work ? Yes ! the record of his labours 
is a record of extraordinary triumph and 
enthusiasm, of phenomenal and varied activity, 
and of imperishable influence. Nothing but 
a living faith could have carried a man through 
all that he did and suffered : — 

" In labours abundant, in stripes above measure, in 
prisons frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times 
received I forty stripes save one, thrice w^as I beaten with 
rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a 
night and a day I have been in the deep. In journeyings 
often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by 
mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils 
in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, 
in perils among false brethren ; in weariness and painful- 
ness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
often, in cold and nakedness. Beside those things that are 
without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of 
all the churches." ^ 

1 2 Cor. xi. 23-28. 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 83 

Nothing but conviction could have faced 
all that, and more of which we know later ; 
and conviction rests on experience, on the 
daily proving of faith. PauPs epistles are full 
of this testing of his faith, and of the power 
and the joy which it brought with it. He 
knew whom he had believed, and he knew 
that it was in weakness that he was strong. 
God's power could not come through egoism, 
it could come only through self-surrender ; 
it could not come through pride, but through 
the knowledge of his frailty and need of God. 
And who was Paul ? A man who had lost 
caste with the classes to become the friend of 
the masses, an invalid often, perhaps a chronic 
invalid, a man of insignificant appearance, 
but a man whose faith centred in God as 
revealed in Jesus Christ. And his continual 
message in varying forms was : — " Let this 
mind be in you which w^as also in Christ." 
It is this mind of Christ which is our Christian 
test of life, and our best interpretation of the 
unseen God. Paul's energy and power were 
a continual witness to the faith in which he 
lived of divine fatherhood and human sonship 
realised in Jesus Christ. His epistles are not 
mere theorising, but are transcripts of ex- 
perience, and are full of this daily verifying 
of his faith. 



84 OUR FAITH IN GOD 



THE WITNESS OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY 

And what is true of Paul is true of thousands 
known and unknown to us throughout the 
ages. The saints and martyrs of the Church 
unite in the same confession of the effectiveness 
of our faith in actual life — 

" Finding, following, keeping, struggling, 
Is He sure to bless ? 
Saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs 
Answer, ' Yes ! ' " 

The history of the martyrs^ for example, 
is a story of human weakness transformed 
into strength — by what ? By the thought of 
God in Christ upon which they leaned their 
souls. And it worked ; sometimes in ways we 
understand, sometimes in ways we do not yet 
understand. Insensibility to physical pain and 
discomfort, amazing cures, astounding feats of 
physical and mental endurance, and unlooked 
for transformations of character, mark the 
whole pathway of the saints of God. The 
age of miracles is never past, though we are 
learning to understand more and more of the 
powers that faith can awaken as the years pass, 
and as God shows us still more of His truth. 
One thing is clear, that we cannot put limits 
to the power of God appropriated by faith. 
To-day men are accepting as reasonable cures 
scoffed at some years ago, and in a few centuries 
more we shall laugh at the limited knowledge 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 85 

which limited God in place of acknowledging 
its own limitations. 

Yes ! faith in God works, and sometimes in 
ways which w^e cannot yet comprehend, but 
which are not the less true on that account. 
We must believe in miracles, or believe Christ 
a myth, and the New Testament a forgery. 
If we allow its full weight to historical evidence, 
rather than prejudging everything by our 
own preconceptions and knowledge, we must 
admit the existence of unexplained works of 
God in every age since Christ. Whether we 
shall come to understand them all or not, as 
we are to-day coming to understand some, 
matters little ; what matters is that Christian 
faith has proved God to be sufficient for all 
emergencies, and that the conception of God 
given us by Christ works even here and now, 
when we venture upon it. Christian bio- 
graphy is full of the unexpected from the 
worldly standpoint, but not the unexpected 
to faith. Above all in the records of Christian 
prayer biography gives us a very clear proof 
of the effectiveness of our faith, when self 
has been surrendered, and the will of God 
made the norm of life. The story of George 
Miiller of Bristol, whose faith for his orphan 
children even in extremity was not dis- 
appointed but honoured so repeatedly by 
God ; the story of Hudson Taylor, who built 
up the China Inland Mission upon half a 
crown and faith ; the stories of many of the 



86 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

pioneer missionaries, such as J. G. Paton of 
the New Hebrides, who came through seem- 
ingly impossible situations in the power of 
God — such a wdtness is uniform among the 
heroic souls of the Church at home or abroad. 
A worried doubter who went in despair 
to the great New England bishop, Phillips 
Brooks, came out a new man, and told his 
friends that it was not argument he needed, 
but contact with a triumphant spirit, i.e. with 
a living faith. And what was the spirit and 
the faith of Phillips Brooks ? It was faith in 
God through Jesus Christ ; and Phillips 
Brooks' message to the world is this, in his 
own words— 

** Do not pray for easier lives, pray to be stronger 
men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, pray 
for powers equal to your tasks." 

i.e. accept the tasks, and expect the powers. 
If we lean upon God as conceived by and 
through Jesus Christ, we shall find, and do 
find, ourselves borne up as the swimmer is 
borne upon the sea. The testing of the unseen 
is the honouring of God ; and " whoso 
honoureth Me, I will honour.'' The faith 
of the Christian in the character and resources 
of God is being verified in every generation, 
and every day. Read, and keep your eyes and 
ears open, and you will know that it is so, 
unless you have determined not to know it. 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 87 

THE WITNESS OF PRESENT EXPERIENCE 

And the testimony of Christian experience 
is still what it has been in all centuries. We 
can experience the power of God to-day as 
surely as those of former times. Yea ! we who 
are called by the name of Christ still can and 
do speak " that we do know." 

We know in very fact that God can break 
a man's fetters, the fetters of besetting sin and 
recurrent temptation, the fetters of ignoble 
desire or of an unworthy spirit. We know 
that God can give a man a new spirit, a 
new power, a new enthusiasm for the things 
that are clean and true and noble, which is 
able to drive out the old life and its works, 
not indeed all at once perhaps, lest we should 
not prize that which cost us nothing, but 
surely and continually. We know that God 
can give a man victory over fear, for fear is 
the outcome of self, and victory over self 
means the decay and destruction of the roots 
of fear. 

In an age of questioning doubt, one of the 
great fears is the fear of disaster through facing 
the truth ; but we know that God is Truth, 
and that He can enable a man to be sincere 
and unafraid to face things to the bottom, 
and to overcome. The darkness of doubt 
may be the prelude of dawn if a man will trust 
in the God of all truth, and stake his whole 
mental life upon the belief that the pathway 



88 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

of truth and sincerity, for all its apparent 
danger, leads not to hell, but away from it, 
not from God, but to His very presence. 
Men sometimes are afraid to think, lest they 
be lost for ever ; they ride at anchor, fearing 
the high seas of truth and venture ; but v^e 
know th^at God, the author of truth, can give 
the victory, and does, both over fear and over 
error, if a man will trust Him. 

We know that God can lead a man safely 
through the fires of hell upon earth, through 
the judgment day of self-realisation and con- 
viction of sin, when the floods seem to threaten 
our destruction, and the pit yawns for our souls ; 
for we know that the judgment day which does 
not come here must com.e beyond, that all 
self-realisation is for good, not for evil, and 
that we can trust God in all our need, and find 
His power in the night. 

And so with the other aspects of life. In 
the Christian biography of our day the proof 
is so obvious of God's love and purposes that 
I am continually amazed that it does not 
convince many more people ; but, finding 
in my own heart the continual temptation 
to unbelief, even when faith seems ninety- 
nine per cent, justified by events, I understand 
that there is no conviction apart from the 
will and the surrender of self. The hypothesis 
of Christian life which we call our conception 
of God is proved continually in experience. 
God still gives to man the power to face any 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 89 

passion, any fact, any fear, any circumstance, 
if man will yield himself to the all-embracing 
love and power w^hich are seeking him. In 
our weakness His strength is made perfect ; 
and few indeed ever learn the lesson of faith 
till they have seen their weakness and their 
need of divine strength, till they have learned 
in the valley of humiliation and suffering that 
egoism is not the way, but God, and, putting 
self aside, affirm the eternal Love as their life 
and their God. 

This our faith, then, I believe to be effective 
in every sphere of life, intellectual, moral, or 
physical ; it can break every fetter of the soul. 
Sincerity knows that it is strong, and sincerity 
is faith in truth, and in the power of truth 
to preserve the soul. Courage knows that it 
is strong, and courage for rational minds is 
faith in God's overruling providence, and in 
the value of things unseen. Trust is the 
way of peace, and so of efficiency, and it rests 
upon faith in what we cannot touch or handle. 
Out of egoism is born fear, and out of fear 
most of the ills and sins that humanity knows, 
with ill-health of body, mind and soul. Faith 
is the denial of fear, the affirmation of the 
positive goodness of the world, and all that 
underlies it. And faith is power, for faith is 
man's union with God, the source of all might 
and all good ; and the greater the faith the 
greater the power. In the life of Christ we 
see that the greatest faith and the greatest 



90 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

power, physical and spiritual, go hand in hand. 
The physical miracles of Christ and the moral 
miracles of His being are the counterpart of 
His unswerving trust in God, and He taught 
His followers this truth, with no qualifications 
^ — ^' All things are possible to him that believeth, 
for with God all things are possible." Christ 
expected His followers to do the same w^orks 
as He did Himself, and for a while the Church 
lived in an atmosphere of such faith, and 
with such a baptism of power ; but the Church 
lost its vision, its trust in the unseen, and 
its power ; it began to put its trust in the seen 
and temporal, and the tragedy of unfaith soon 
came upon it in physical and spiritual power- 
lessness. Here and there are gleams of light 
in the darkness as a great soul passes through 
our common days to the life beyond by the 
way of Christ so little trodden, the way of 
immediate trust and fellowship ; but, until 
to-day, " failure '' is the verdict of honest men, 
not upon Christ, but upon the Church which 
has professed His name. There are signs of 
the stirring of the dead bones to-day, and hope 
is with us again, hope founded on the know- 
ledge of our weakness, in which God's strength 
may be made perfect ; but we have not yet 
reached the days of triumphant faith, only as 
yet of tentative and timorous venture. The 
gospel of Christ is clear about God, His love, 
His wisdom. His power, but modern theology 
on the whole is uncertain, because it is only 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 91 

theoretical where Christ was practical, it is 
speculating where Christ was living. 



THE TW^O WAYS TO CHRISTIAN POWER 

Let us now consider the two chief ways in 
which the Christian conception of God becomes 
effective in life. The first is by suggestion 
(one of the catchw^ords of our day, and 
deservedly so). Doctors have assured us from 
their personal knowledge of psychotherapy 
that the best results are obtained by what 
is called " theotherapy," or healing by the 
suggestion and consciousness of God, and of 
what He is. The suggestion of health has a 
great deal less power when divorced from 
religion than when it is definitely associated 
with religious beliefs and forms — such is the ex- 
perience of experts. As one prominent writer 
has said, " The safest mind cure is the thought 
of God '' ; and all religious life or experience 
is full of psychotherapy, and in particular 
of theotherapy. God gives unity, coherence, 
definition and power to our principles and 
aspirations (which in themselves are a confession 
of faith either in God, or gods, that is, in the 
unseen but eternal things) ; and by dwelling 
on the idea of God in its varied aspects and 
meanings we grow in spiritual life and power. 
Suggestion is perhaps the most powerful 
weapon for good in the world as we know it ; 
and in the category of suggestion the idea of 



92 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

God ranks first as the fullest and most potent 
of all the means of suggestion. In God we 
visualise and make real for life all our principles 
and ideals of good at once ; God includes them 
all, and more, and dwelling consciously in 
His presence, especially in our times of private 
prayer or public worship, we grow stronger, 
purer, braver, calmer, humbler, more patient, 
more confident, and more unselfish. As we 
dwell upon His great unselfishness, kindness 
grows in our hearts ; as we dwell upon His 
patience and His goodness, there comes a 
great humility. His omnipotence gives us 
confidence. His wisdom calms our worry and 
fear. His purity rebukes our sin, His love 
condemns our hate and sham^es our treacherous 
hearts. His truth strengthens our sincerity, 
His immutability gives us assurance. His beauty 
makes us fall down and worship. Thus belief 
works by suggestion, and its success verifies 
our belief ; otherwise we must hold the 
absurd view that untruth is in harmony with 
nature. That which works must, for common 
sense, spring out of truth ; and Christ's 
conception of God works. The better the 
conception of God, the surer its verification 
in experience. The believer in God casts 
all his burdens upon other shoulders ; for 
him there is no worry, no weakness, no fear, 
no paralysis, no inefficiency. For if God be 
love, why should we fear ; if God cares, why 
should we worry ; if God guides and rules 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 93 

all things, why should we be cast down ? 
Christ's idea of God verifies itself continually 
in the mind that accepts it, and dwells upon 
it. It gives victory, and any one of us knows 
well enough in life the difference between 
defeat and victory. " This is the victory 
that overcometh — our faith." 

The second w^ay in which the Christian 
conception of God becomes effective for life 
is by testing or venture, and, as I have already 
spoken of it so much, I shall not dwell long upon 
it at this point, but something yet remains 
to be added to what I have said in this regard. 
Suggestion without active reinforcement will 
not carry one far ; a man cannot accept ideas 
and at the same time refuse them, or refuse 
their obvious implications. Venture is 
necessary even for the sake of successful sug- 
gestion, and in itself it is needed as the necessary 
expression of a living faith. Without works 
suggestion is feeble, without works faith is 
dead. Our conception of God must be tested 
and ventured upon, not merely in prayer, 
spiritual meditation, and mental life, but in 
action, in concrete life. And venture proves 
that it is effective and true. For example, 
we must have a venturing trust in God's 
providence, i.e. in the powder, wisdom, know- 
ledge, and care of God. Many are the stories 
from Christian biography which might here 
be quoted, but you can find and read them for 
yourselves. One must even trust in God when 



94 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

no way out of our impasse is obvious to 
our understanding. There is an economy in 
God's miracles, but they are a reality none 
the less ; the power of God is never overtaxed ; 
His resources are always enough, and always 
available ; His all-sufficiency is proved in 
every brave and honest attempt to forget self 
in His work. God likes faith, and He rejoices 
to honour it. The apostolic days are still 
with us in isolated lives and circumstances ; 
and modern religious literature has the proof 
of it in hundreds of recorded incidents. Such 
a life as that of Father John of the Russian 
Church, or that of Pastor Hsi of Manchuria, 
reminds us that the first blessing has never 
been revoked. It is we who are at fault, not 
God. We must learn anew from Christ that 
nothing is too hard for God, and nothing too 
small for God. Our imagination gets terror- 
ised by scientific figures as we realise the 
immensity of the universe and our own physical 
insignificance. We need to stand once more 
with Christ upon the mountain of faith, and 
trust the God whom He trusted, the God 
who is great enough to care about the small 
things, great enough to be our Father, and to 
bear all our burdens with us, and for us, if 
we will let Him. 

For the future we must venture more, 
whether along the line of voluntary poverty 
in our economic problems, as the mediaeval 
saints, and as William James recently, have 



IS IT EFFECTR E ? 95 

suggested, or along some other line called for 
by the world's needs. Whether wc be poor 
or no, we must be poor in spirit ; for to be 
of the poor in spirit {i.e. dependent on God) 
is to be rich in faith, and so in power and in 
joy. It is not for men of wisdom and tact 
that God is looking, but for men of courage and 
faith, \vho will give the divine wisdom free 
course and become channels of the divine power 
and love. All rational courage must spring 
out of faith, and Christ's call is for such faith 
and such courage. Life is a great opportunity 
for brave men, and life's imperishable rewards 
are for faith. The reward of unfaith is 
death ; in every sphere of life despair and 
fear make for the destruction of life and all 
life's goods. Faith is not only the great 
opportunity of human life, it is the necessity 
ol an abiding life. Around us is a sea uncharted 
and mysterious, but, like all seas, it can be 
swum in by men who will venture, who will 
cease asking if Christianity works, and will 
begin to try it. 

THE UNIVERSAL POWER OF OUR FAITH 

But let us ask further — Granting our con- 
ception of God does work for us in this 
part of the world, is it effective the world 
over ? Of course it needs a certain amount 
of translation to become intelligible in other 
environments, whether of time or place, 



96 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

and such translation of God is the main 
work and meaning of theology in every age 
and clime ; but once reasonably compre- 
hensible to the people concerned, it does 
work, it does prove itself effective in life, 
and just as effective elsewhere as here. The 
essential message of God in Christ has 
been preached the world over, and with 
substantially the same results amongst all 
races and classes and tongues. The proof 
is clearly to hand in the story of Christian 
missions, in which the efficacy of our faith has 
been tested again and again, and its universal 
meaning and appeal demonstrated, in lives 
charged with new power and enthusiasm for 
all that is good, and in evil habits, customs, 
and influences transformed. 

Sometimes it has been contended, by those 
learned men who regard Christianity as merely 
a civilising power, expressing the ideals of a 
high civilisation, and far beyond the compre- 
hension or imitation of more primitive peoples, 
that missions to the more savage and unen- 
lightened races are an absurd mistake, and a 
waste of personnel, time and. money. The 
facts are otherwise. Savage peoples like the can- 
nibals of the Solomon Islands, or the warriors 
of Uganda, have in a generation been changed 
utterly ; and in individual cases have risen in 
character to a height that has shamed our 
boasted Western Christianity. No man is too 
low for our gospel of God in Christ. Deliver- 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 97 

ance and elevation are possible for all the tribes 
of earth by the means of the Christian evangel. 
The islands of the sea, Japan, India, China, 
Africa, Greenland, South America, all give as 
powerful and convincing a testimony to the 
power of our gospel of the eternal God as do 
the older Christian civilisations of Europe and 
North America. Our gospel does work, but 
it cannot till it is known ; and how can they 
hear without a preacher .? If our salvation 
could be confined in rites and ceremonies, 
preaching might be dispensed with ; but it 
centres in the conception of God revealed 
by Christ, and therefore it must be spoken 
and interpreted by man to man. In the 
mission field, or at home, wherever the pro- 
vidence of God may call or place us, we must 
test and prove our faith, or it is dead ; we 
must live dangerously. The faith that will 
venture, and take the risks of venture, is the 
only faith that will call out the power of the 
Christian salvation, the power that will truly 
heal the broken-hearted, preach convincingly 
deliverance to the captives and recovery of 
sight to the blind, the power that can in very 
deed set at liberty them that are bruised, or 
that can unashamedly and effectively preach 
the gospel, as Jesus did, to the poor. Like 
the three heroes of Israel who faced the fiery 
furnace for their faith, we must nail our 
colours to the mast — or the Cross if you 
prefer it — and declare and carry through our 



98 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

venture of faith in words and deeds like 
theirs : — 

" O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer 
thee In this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve 
is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and 
He will deliver us out of thine hands, O King ; but ifnoty 
be it known unto thee, O King, that we will not serve 
thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast 
set up." 1 

The words are a trumpet-call to faith, a 
rallying-point for all true believers ; faith like 
that is no weathercock that turns with the 
wind, and such faith still proves itself by its 
works, and demonstrates even to sceptical 
minds that the age of miracles is not gone. 

THE SOCIAL TESTING OF CHRISTIANITY 

Let us for a moment look at our question 
from the social standpoint. We have our 
social problems, many and serious. Does our 
conception of God meet them, and solve them 
effectively ? I believe it is the only solution, 
when, as in Christ's case, it is embodied in 
human flesh and the works of human brain 
and hand. Our very conception of God is 
essentially social ; it is that of Love ever 
going forth and seeking expression in others 
— the Father in the Son — ever giving itself 
for the life of its children. The self-emptying 
of God, found in theology in Paul's doctrine 
of the humiliation of Christ, is the great 

1 Daniel iii. 16-18, 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 99 

fundamental reality of our lives within and of 
our universe without. Selflessness is the rock 
upon which the worlds are built, for it is the 
nature of God ; and of all human conceptions 
it is that which has most social meaning. 
God's love is absolute. His humility perfect. 

The Old Testament idea of God as the 
potentate who holds rebellious men in derision, 
the arbitrary and self-centred despot who seeks 
His own g]ory, is not the conception of God 
which Christ gave us, but something like its 
antithesis. The true glory of God is the 
welfare of His people. His creation ; and God 
Himself is, of all beings, the most humble, 
the most unselfish, the most patient. Christ's 
great legislation for the Kingdom in the 
so-called " Sermon on the Mount '' bases all 
its revolutionary, social, and ethical teaching 
upon one thing, the nature of God : — 

" Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them 
which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye 
may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven ; 
for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the 
good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." ^ 

Our conception of God, therefore, is our 
inspiration and example, our power, and even 
our programme ; and, following God so, we 
shall become perfect, even as our Father which 
is in Heaven is perfect. The character of 
God is the background of the Christian gospel ; 
and it works when tested, because men have 

1 Matt, Y. 44, 45. 



100 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

been made by God in His image. In other 
words, the Christian doctrine as preached by 
Christ is — Treat man as you would treat 
God, and as God Himself treats you — with 
reverence, with love, and with expectancy 
of the best ; and, being divine in his ultimate 
texture, he will respond. And in actual fact 
he does, though sometimes we meet with 
temporary and even lengthy failures. But 
faith in man, the corollary of faith in God, 
is the way of progress ; and modern methods 
in the education of children, the amelioration 
of criminals, and the like, have already given 
us reasonable evidence that Jesus Christ was 
right in His extraordinary teaching, which the 
Church has buried in a napkin for so long, 
except for individuals of vision and Godlike- 
ness. Alexander Irvine has an appealing 
sketch of the power and meaning of such a 
Christianity in his first book, where " My Lady 
of the Chimney Corner " bids her friend look 
for, and see, the Son of Man even in the most 
despised of human lives. J. K. Jerome's 
Passing of the Third-Jloor Back is perhaps 
a still better known literary clothing of the 
same great message, that man is to be saved 
by recognising, not so much his sin and his 
shame, but his divinity, and his possibilities 
for all that is true and worthy. God is in 
man ; and to realise it is to understand Christ's 
message of the Kingdom, and to have the key 
to all our problems, so far as we can have the 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? loi 

key. It is God who will solve them, not we ; 
and that when we have put ourselves into His 
hands, like children, to be no longer our own, 
but His. In that selfless life w^e learn that 
egoism is our only real problem, and that the 
brotherhood of man is only another aspect of 
the fatherhood of God. Our problems are 
made by the insistence upon our rights, com- 
bined with the impossibility of defining or 
adjusting mutual rights, and along the line 
of rights there is no solution ; the solution is 
ours only by the surrender of the idea of rights, 
in the interests of the Kingdom of God, and 
by the acceptance of that which we receive, 
rather than the grasping of that whic h w^e can 
lay hold of. Mercy not justice, atonement not 
retribution, love not law, grace not rights, are 
the meanings both of God and of faith. The 
imitatio Dei^ which is in concrete fact the 
imitatio Christie is the truest service both of 
God and of man. We use the words " imman- 
ence " and '' transcendence " of God in rela- 
tion to His dual presence, without us, and 
within. Transcendence means the fatherhood 
of God, immanence the brotherhood of man ; 
and the two are one God, even as Christ and 
His Father are one. 



INEFFECTIVE CONCEPTIONS OF GOD 

But our conception of God does not always 
work ; Christ's did, but ours does not always, 



102 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

because it is often wrong. Wrong concep- 
tions of God will not work, and thereby we 
can tell the true from the false. Some of our 
ideas of God are unworthy of man, some 
unworthy of Christian men. Let me speak 
of some such. 

The man who, in danger or discomfort, 
cries upon God to deliver him, with no thought 
beyond his own pleasures and pains, and expects 
God, all forgotten in days of prosperity, to 
become an emergency exit to safety for his 
timorous body or mind, knows little of God, 
and can hardly expect to find his faith effective. 
The man who prays to God to avert some 
unpleasant possibility of the future, in the 
expectation that his prayer will avail to make 
God change His mind, knows little of God, 
and can hardly look for an answer such as he 
desires. Need does bring God very close to 
His children, and prayer does change things ; 
but neither need nor prayer change God. His 
nature changeth not ; but He may be enabled 
in our need, or by our prayer, to make effective 
to us gifts He has been offering all the time. 
God is not arbitrary in His doings. He is 
not partial in His tastes ; He is not indulgent or 
lenient towards our sins. His love is perfect, 
strong, inexorable, and stern, and will take 
from us no pain, or sorrow, or discomfort, or 
struggle, which are necessary for our soul's 
truest welfare. He does not ever afflict will- 
ingly nor grieve the children of men ; and 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 103 

the true faith does not ask an easy way, but 
God's way, whatever it may be. And God is 
not to be bribed or argued out of His best 
love for us, merely because we think Him 
indulgent or partial or arbitrary ; His selfless 
passion for us seeks our highest good, and will 
give us nothing less, no matter what the cost 
to us or to Him. Such unworthy views of 
God do not work ; and the faith which can 
be lost in God, because He sends sorrow and 
conflict in place of ease and pleasure, is no faith 
at all, but a supreme egoism. The idea of the 
partiality of God is found often in such forms 
as the belief that God is a national or local 
deity, w^ho has made us, or some other people, 
to be His peculiar possession, the elect of God, 
the salt of the earth ; and that other peoples 
with other skins, other habitations and other 
tongues, are lower types of humanity. The 
" kultur mission," the " white man's burden," 
and the like, often conceal the belief in a 
national God which does not work. God 
cares as much for Egyptians, Indians and 
Germans as for Englishmen or Irishmen, for 
Roman Catholics as for Protestants ; His 
universal interest and care know no geographical 
boundaries nor grades of favouritism. I do 
not say these things to irritate any one, but 
only under the twin convictions that they are 
true, and that they need to be said. 

Again, in the common talk of God's justice 
we get another conception which often is 



104 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

untrue and does not work. The theosophic 
law of Karma, and the orthodox Protestant 
doctrine of atonement, often represent the 
deification of an impersonal justice, which 
reacts like a machine against good and evil in 
different directions, rewarding the good and 
punishing the evil, as if it itself were a great 
neutral thing, and acted by blind instinct 
rather than benevolent purpose. This con- 
ception of justice, so common in popular 
theology, stands for something morally neuter 
and physically automatic, and has little in 
common with Christ's thought, of God. Not 
justice, but righteousness, is the true word to 
use in this connection. God's interests are 
not to mete out its deserts to man's sin, but to 
change the sinner. His passion is for righteous- 
ness, not for punishment and reward. He is 
not a machine but a person, giving no pain 
which is unnecessary ; not balancing our 
accounts of good and evil, but seeking only to 
bring good out of evil, and repentance out of 
transgression. It is righteous and purposeful 
love, not mechanical and neutral justice, which 
is the Christian conception of God. Men do 
not get their deserts either in this world or in 
the next, but they get the discipline which a 
selfless love appoints as necessary for their 
growth in spiritual understanding and achieve- 
ment, and for the leading of the human soul 
to surrender itself to God. All conversion, 
all religious experience prove the truth of the 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 105 

Christian view — it works. The other is a 
figment of man's imagination which docs not, 
and never did, work. Love, not law, is at the 
helm in our passage over the ocean of life ; 
and it is a personal, purposeful, inexorable and 
enduring love, to which a man can commit 
everything without either fear or shame. 

Again, God is not the author of evil in 
character or circumstances. It is true in a 
very real sense that " God's in His Heaven, 
all's right with the world " ; but that does 
not mean that things are satisfactory, or that 
they do not require changing. As the West- 
minster Confession of Faith has pointed out, to 
say that God ordains evil does not make Him 
the author of it. The Christian view of God 
only warrants us in saying that out of evil God 
is bringing, and will bring, good ; it does not 
call evil good. 

" Him being delivered by the determinate counsel 
and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by zvicked 
hands have crucified and slain, whom God hath raised." ^ 

God's purpose and man's sin go hand in 
hand, though their habitations are poles 
asunder. 

God is no excuse for human sin, for insanitary 
housing, for sweating wages, for ignorance, and 
dirt, and hate. Out of these terrible things 
He will indeed bring forth good as men respond 
to His call. At present he can only overrule 
them, perhaps for revolution, perhaps for 

^ Acts ii. 23, 24. 



io6 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

spiritual awakening, but ultimately for good. 
It is men who are holding Him back with their 
present unworthy hearts and unworthy actions. 
Christianity gives us no divine right for 
present conditions ; nay ! it makes us hate 
many of them, as nothing else does or can — 
and why ? Because God hates them, and 
would change them as soon as men will co- 
operate with Him in that work. 

The defenders of slavery claimed the fiat of 
God for it, but their conception of God did 
not work, even though they quoted Scripture 
to their purpose. In its cruder manifesta- 
tions Christianity has by now condemned it, 
but not yet in its subtler forms. Indeed the 
amount of work still to be done is appalling 
when we realise it. Let us get at it at once, 
and remember that Christianity would wean us 
from satisfaction with the present to a satis- 
faction with God alone, and with the future 
w^hich He can make for man when life is made 
over to Him as its only ideal and master. God 
in Christ, selfless living in the present for the 
future, is Christianity. To live dangerously, 
socially, sincerely, and trustfully, that is the 
Christian salvation ; and it works. Wrong 
conceptions will not and cannot work, because 
they are rooted in nothing but our ignorance ; 
the true conception, the mind of Christ about 
God, so far as we can understand and appro- 
priate it, will and does work, because it is 
rooted in the foundations of life and all that 



IS IT EFFECTIVE ? 107 

is. But the world sorely needs brave men who 
will try and prove that way, the way of God 
in Christ, and so lift the whole round earth 
nearer to God, and to all that even now we 
value in life. If we have done this, when our 
day for leaving our work on earth behind us 
shall come, shall we not rejoice in the presence 
of the King ? If we have not done this, no 
matter what fame or wealth or other self- 
importance we may have achieved, shall we 
not know and sorrow that we have sold our 
lives, our opportunities, our birthright, for a 
mesg of pottage ? 



The Fourth Question: 
Is it Final? 

WHITTIER the poet once asked Emerson 
the essayist if he believed that Jesus 
Christ was the final revelation of God to man. 
" His is the greatest life the v^orld has so far 
known/' was the reply, " but not the greatest 
it shall know." There we have the question 
of the finality of our Christian faith definitely 
raised by two great and good men who actually 
disagreed as to the answer. It may be that a 
discussion of the question by me to-day will 
not lead any of us very much nearer to giving 
a personal answer than we are ; but I think it 
might be of help to touch upon the points 
which are of chief importance to us, and, if 
possible, to clear up our minds on some essential 
matters. It is our faith in God which is in 
question, for the life of Jesus Christ means 
nothing but failure and high-sounding words 
apart from a belief in the unseen ; it is in 
relation to the unseen world that He becomes 
all important. For the Christian consciousness 
and experience, Jesus Christ, the highest life 
we know, is the measure of God, the effective 
and concrete symbol of the invisible realities. 

THE PROBLEM STATED 

But the highest we know is not necessarily 
the highest possible. Have we any right to 

108 



IS IT FINAL ? 109 

assume that it is ? Or if not, in what sense can 
we speak of Christ's interpretation of God, 
in teaching and life, as final ? It is a serious 
question, though not really so serious as it 
looks, for it belongs to the sphere of specula- 
tion rather than to that of the practical reason 
by which we live ; but it is serious enough, if, 
like the majority within the Churches to-day, 
we misunderstand the issues, and assume 
that Christianity stands or falls by a belief 
that Jesus Christ is not only unsurpassed, 
but altogether, and in every respect, and in 
every sphere of life's activities, unsurpassable. 
There is often an extraordinary confusion 
of thought and values here, and a failure 
to discriminate between the spiritual and 
vital aspects of religion and the physical 
or psychological limitations imposed on its 
expression in any age or environment. In 
some former days Christ was conceived of as 
exactly six feet high, on the assumption that 
that was a perfect height, and that Christ 
must in everything have been perfect ; a 
theory with a confusion of values which has 
done more harm in the doctrines both of 
Christ's person and of the Scriptures, the 
Words living and written, than any other such, 
and which rests upon the altogether ridicul- 
ous assumption that Christ is a final and perfect 
model of man in everything, — art, letters, 
science, criticism, carpentering, theology, 
archaeology, music, and the like, — as well as 



no OUR FAITH IN GOD 

in the spheres of morality and religion. It 
would have been even more reasonable to 
assume that Christ's height was infinite than 
to decide upon six feet, but in that case the 
doctrinaires would have seen the absurdity 
much more easily. 

The question, however, is a serious one, 
because there is behind it both a true perception 
of Christ's meaning, and a confusion of thought 
as to the theological bearing of that meaning ; 
and to clear up this matter, so far as I personally 
can see the issues, may, I think, be of help to 
some. To me individually the finality of 
Christ in some sense or senses appears as 
perfectly reasonable ; but it is important to 
face and understand the realities of the situa- 
tion before we attempt an answer. Any 
attempt to bully our own or other minds into 
giving the answer " yes, " in the belief that 
we must do so, or " without doubt we shall 
perish everlastingly," is sheer absurdity, and 
only recoils disastrously upon the soul that 
does it. The only " yes " worth anything 
is a sincere and intelligent one. Truth must 
be faced without prejudice, and with a sincere 
attempt to accept all light from every quarter, 
and to follow truth wherever it may lead. 
Truth is God, and sincerity cannot lead a man 
nearer to hell, or away from God ; for God 
is not divided against Himself, and sincerity 
is one of the high roads to His presence that 
the soul must travel, or be lost in the wilder- 



IS IT FINAL? Ill 

ness. I know of no way of accepting truly the 
Christian faith which does not rest upon a 
willingness to change it any day for a better, 
if the other faith in question could be proved 
really more satisfactory, and more entitled to 
our acceptance. 

It is only when a man stands firm upon 
truth and sincerity that he begins to realise 
the power of Christianity, to realise that 
he is not holding it, but it is holding 
him. Truth is not so much a thing for 
which we have to fight, as a thing which 
fights for us if we will let it. Therefore, 
I would say — Fear not to discuss whether 
Jesus Christ be final. It is by the actual 
comparison of our Scriptures with other books, 
not by their artificial segregation, that we begin 
to appreciate their true worth ; it is by the 
comparison of Jesus Christ with other great 
men, not by His theological segregation from 
other men, that we begin, like the first apostles, 
to see His true meaning and glory, full of grace 
and truth ; and it will be by the actual facing 
of the question of Christ's finality as a real 
thing that we shall come to understand in 
what sense we can predicate finality of Him, 
and in what sense to do so is a denial of faith. 
And again I repeat, Christ's finality is, and must 
be, the finality of that faith in God by which 
He lived, and to which He has led our minds 
as His disciples. 



112 OUR FAITH IN GOD 



IN WHAT SENSES CHRIST CANNOT BE FINAL 

Let US take the question, then, seriously. 
Is Christ final for us ? Is His life the final 
revelation of God ? Is His teaching the final 
word on all man's problems, or on some, or 
on none ? Let us grant on the basis of the 
former addresses that Christ's is the highest 
life known to us, so far as we can differentiate 
between lives with their multiplicity of values 
and interests, of powers and aspirations ; 
the future is still unknown, and can we assert, 
on the basis of the past, that nothing higher 
can come in the future than has already come ? 
I am now going deliberately to put things 
very bluntly, because of the necessity of our 
seeing clearly the issues involved. Is it not 
presumption, is it not dogmatism, to assert 
that Christ is final ? Is it not at bottom an 
unscrupulous attempt at all costs to gain 
certainty and assurance in matters of faith, 
which leads us so vehemently to assure one 
another that the Christ upon whom we have 
leant cannot become less final for us, no matter 
how long the earth may abide, but is God's 
last word to men on this side of the grave ? 

What do we mean by the word " final " 
as applied to the Christian faith ? We mean 
last, or ultimate, no doubt, but in what sense ? 
As covering all life, or a part of life, or what ? 
On all sides we see in the world about us 
progress of varying kinds. We see intellectual 



IS IT FINAL? 113 

progress in the understanding of life, and in 
synthesising our knowledge and building upon 
it ever more successful practical methods or 
adaptations of nature ; progress in the under- 
standing of our own minds, of nature's content, 
of nature's laws, of actual facts in every sphere. 
We see aesthetic progress in the appreciation 
of ever new forms of beauty, in the adaptation 
of nature's powers to beautify and enrich 
life in every direction, in the refining and 
strengthening of our aesthetic faculties and 
of our nervous organisations, in the production 
of classics of beauty, and so forth. We see 
moral progress, so called, in the continuous 
uplifting of mankind from the brutal to the 
humane stage of life, in the disappearance of 
social, economic, industrial, and international 
abuses, and, even where failure is yet to be 
recorded, in the steady growth of public 
opinion against these things ; progress in 
the institutional developments by which 
morality is preserved, and handed on as a 
heritage won for future generations, and so 
forth. There are some difficulties in the theory 
of progress, I admit, but not very serious ; 
accepting progress, then, can we regard events 
of nearly two millenniums ago, such as the 
mind and actions of Jesus Christ, as final in 
an absolute and all-inclusive sense ? Has not 
mankind advanced in a hundred ways since 
then, and are not many of these advances 
quite free from any direct connection with 



114 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

the life and work of Christ ? The problem 
becomes acute in a matter like Biblical criticism 
or biological science. Are Christ's theories 
of the authorship of Deuteronomy, or of the 
iioth Psalm, final for us, or His views about 
astronomy, or even about angels and demons ? 
Does God really brand as blasphemy all sincere 
attempts to understand the world, which have 
led men to repudiate the account of creation 
in the book of Genesis in favour of the account 
given by Darwin and others, or to repudiate 
the traditions of the Old Testament writings 
held by the Jews of Christ's day, and by Him 
often in common with them, in favour of later 
views based on the hard brain labour of 
scholars ? Or is it only a mistaken theology 
that denounces these seeming advances of 
thought as blasphemous, a theology which 
prefers supposed certainties of the past to the 
venturing faith of the present by which alone 
any of us are saved ? 

Quite seriously, I think we must admit 
progress along nearly every line since Christ 
was here ; but not a little of that progress is 
the indirect result of the new spirit He brought ; 
for " deny thyself " is not only Christ's first 
principle of life, it is the first principle of 
all the noblest science and art, and the secret 
of their achievements. It is to this spirit of 
Christ that we shall have to look, rather than 
to its external vestments, as that which is 
most original and most final in Christ's work j 



IS IT FINAL? 115 

and certainly we do not honour it, but dis- 
honour it, by shutting our eyes and ears to 
present facts, and living in an old-world 
paradise of our ow^n or our forefathers' 
imagining, in which are to be found the exact 
answers to all our questions and problems. 
Such a view puts the fool's cap on all history 
since Christ. God did not forestall the 
twentieth century in the first ; to each century 
He has given its own work ; and the true 
meaning of Christ does not rob life of any of 
its achievements, or of its conscious quests 
after truth, beauty and goodness : the history 
of man's thought was not foreclosed in Jesus 
Christ, or in the Scriptures of Jews and 
Christians. Whatever finality there may be 
about the revelation given us in Christ, it is 
not a finality of personality or of truth in toto ; 
on the aesthetic and intellectual sides of His 
life, at least, no finality is to be found, and 
few to-day would even w^aste their time in 
looking for it, and in trying to prove that Christ 
was the greatest artist and the greatest scientist 
that the w^orld has known ; and even on the 
moral side finality must be sought in the 
spirit, not alw^ays or necessarily in the historical 
forms, of Christ's teaching or life. 

IN WHAT SENSE FINALITY IS POSSIBLE 

No reasonable doctrine of divine incarna- 
tion can carry us much further than this. 
If the docetic heresy of an unreal humanity 



ii6 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

be really a heresy — and few of us will quarrel 
with that judgment of the Church — and if 
the invisible God reveals Himself in human 
personality, we have at least come to realise 
to-day that, to reveal Himself, God must 
limit Himself in time and place. He can, 
moreover, only deal with men as they are, 
and as they are able to bear and understand. 
The life, the personality, the teaching of 
Christ are conditioned historically and locally 
by age and environment, by education, 
geography, heredity, and a thousand other 
things, in such a way that no finality can be 
traced in the forms of His revelation, many of 
which are to-day actually in the dust-bin of 
the past. It is not the Galilean Jew who is 
final, but something which tabernacled in 
Him, and expressed itself in the forms of its 
time, both in thought and practice. God's 
revelation to man is a revelation not of the 
letter which killeth, but of the spirit which 
giveth life ; and in so far as we can speak of 
Christ as final, and His revelation or thought 
of God as final, we shall find such finality 
to lie in His moral and spiritual meaning for 
us, in His attitude of soul to God and man, 
in that spirit of His life which has breathed 
through the ages that followed, but which 
in the days of His flesh clothed itself inevit- 
ably in intellectual, aesthetic, and institutional 
clothes largely made by others, the forms of 
His time ; that spirit which is none other than 



IS IT FINAL ? 117 

the eternal God manifest in the flesh. Many 
are the interpretations made of Christ — 
social reformer, apocalyptist, mystic, and the 
like — but one thing is clear from the variety 
and verisimilitude of these interpretations, 
that they all rest upon one foundation — the 
mind of Christ — for they all breathe the same 
spirit ; all are true in measure, but also all 
are inadequate as interpreting the full meaning 
of Christ, for this is to be found, not in what 
He did or said, but in what He was, above all 
in His attitude towards God and its outworking 
in His treatment of man. There, amid all 
the historical, literary, and ethical problems 
which surround His life and person, we find 
God ; and at bottom the finality of Christ 
for us is a simple matter, it is a matter of His 
absolute self-surrender to God, His selflessness, 
in which all the problems of life are somehow 
lost to view as secondary things. The selfless 
or mystic life of dependence and sonship 
revealed in Christ is such a simple solution of 
all our problems that we struggle against it ; 
we are so convinced of the complexity of 
our own lives, and so anxious to find some 
dogmatic or other external prop in our thought 
of Christ, that the idea of salvation by unity 
with Him in His spirit of selflessness is readily 
rejected, both as too easy and as too hard — 
philosophically too easy, but morally too hard. 
We want a more complicated but less exacting 
system, and the simplicity that is in Christ 



ii8 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

lies like a pearl in the mud unnoticed amid all 
our great philosophical, social, political, and 
ethical discussions. Yet I venture to affirm 
that all religion rests upon one thing, our 
attitude towards God, the not-self, the All, 
the universe, the fundamental life or reality 
of things ; and that in that sphere of will, 
or morality, or spirit, Jesus Christ, and none 
other, is the Captain of our salvation. 

But let us look a little more closely at these 
points before we come to a positive conclusion 
in answering our question of to-day. In the 
forms of thought, in the knowledge of nature, 
in the achievements of art and the developing 
appreciation of ever more elaborate and perfect 
forms of beauty and its expression, and in a 
hundred other ways such as social science, 
economic comprehension, political theory, we 
can mark the world's progress far beyond the 
historical limits of the life of Christ. We 
know to-day many things which were not known 
to Christ ; His knowledge was such as the 
Father granted to Him for the specific work of 
His mission, and everywhere Christ definitely 
recognises these limitations of His life, and 
His dependence for knowledge as for all else 
upon the Father. Intellectually, then, the 
Christ of the Gospels is not final, but, in so 
far as intellectual gain is morally conditioned, 
He is none the less the true leader even of the 
intellectuals themselves. His free criticism 
of the Old Testament, His bold rejection of 



IS IT FINAL ? 119 

Jewish customs and prejudices. His brilliant 
dialectic and repartees in debate and difficult 
situations, His whole-hearted acceptance of 
truth from any quarter and perception of 
goodness in any one, even the most despised — 
in the outcast harlot, the hated Roman, the 
despised Syrophoenician, the heretic Samaritan 
— all point to a spirit of self-denial in the 
pursuit of God's truth which is the primary 
condition of gaining it, and which makes Him 
the leader of all sincere thought, the greatest 
exponent of the will to believe. But, as He 
had a certain height, so He had a certain 
brain, a certain education, being those ordained 
by the Father as suitable for His work, but none 
the less historically and socially conditioned 
and limited. What matters for us is what 
lay behind these things, not the instrument 
which His powers or organs of mind and body 
constituted, but the player upon it and the 
spirit in which He played it. The forms of 
life are advancing with us, but can we seriously 
hold that the life itself, which uses these forms, 
is advancing or has advanced beyond Jesus 
Christ ? Have we improved in any real sense 
upon that which made of a village carpenter 
the greatest name of the ages ? I think not. 
This does not answer my question — " Is the 
revelation in Jesus final ? " but at least it shows 
us along what lines finality is to be looked for, 
if at all. 



120 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

THE TRUE FINALITY OF CHRIST 

The spirit of Jesus Christ towards God, 
and man, and all things, the spirit of love, or 
selflessness, or trust, or dependence (for all 
mean the same at bottom, viz. the refusal of 
egoism), is the greatest quickening powder of 
the ages, and is none other than the spirit of 
God clothed w^ith human flesh and mind. As 
regards a future development beyond that ideal 
life, it is not easy to see hov^ we could advance 
beyond it. We may perhaps, in some things, 
be driven to modify or to ignore certain views 
of Christ, e.g, in His theological or scientific 
statements, where they seem to conflict with 
His spirit, or with investigated facts ; but 
that is only to deny the letter that we may the 
more exalt the spirit. Moreover we have the 
warrants of both Christ and Paul for setting 
the spirit above the letter, and for judging the 
letter by the spirit : — 

" Our sufficiency is of God, who also has made us able 
ministers of the New Testament ; not of the letter, but 
of the spirit, for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth 
life."^ 

If in points we must question the words 
of the historic Jesus, it is only to exalt the 
living and eternal Son of God, whose spirit 
even yet leads us on into all truth, and still 
takes of the things of Jesus and interprets 
them to us. 

^ 2 Cor. iii. 5, 6. 



IS IT FINAL ? 121 

Fifty years ago it was popular to interpret 
Christ as a social reformer, and with partial 
truth ; to-day it is popular to interpret Him 
an as apocalyptic enthusiast, and again with 
partial truth ; but a further and truer inter- 
pretation is already to hand in a number of 
modern writings, of which perhaps the most 
challenging and interesting is Hauptmann's 
version of the life of Christ translated into 
terms of our own days, in a book with a 
strange title, ^he Fool in Christy an inter- 
pretation of Christ as the great mystic. To 
my mind this is the truest interpretation 
yet made of Christ, according to which Christ's 
life was one of absolute dependence upon the 
unseen Father ; a dependence for knowledge, 
power, guidance, and the like, in which self 
was lost in the two conceptions, which are at 
bottom one, of God and His Kingdom, i.e. 
self was denied in the service of the one true 
God, unseen even to faith, but found in man 
and all visible things. Beyond this life of 
perfect consecration, absolute self-surrender, 
continual dependence, trust and love, towards 
God the Father and all that is of God, 
i.e. to the All, as to-day we might say, is 
it conceivable that we could advance ? Not 
along that line, I think ; therefore, to 
my mind, it is reasonable to speak of 
Christ as morally or spiritually final in His 
thought of God, and in the essential life 
built upon that thought. 



122 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

Of course inconceivable does not mean 
impossible. In other words, the question 
cannot be closed logically ; but an admission 
that a higher than Christ's revelation is to us 
inconceivable seems to be about as much as 
v^^e could reasonably ask from any thinker. 
Only dogmatism can take the last step and 
declare that God could not give a higher 
revelation ; and to that dogmatism I do not 
feel called to aspire, nor do I think that for 
practical purposes it can have any but an 
injurious outcome. To say that Jesus Christ 
is the highest we know, and that a higher is 
to us inconceivable, is surely as much as we 
need for life ; and in what senses we can say 
this I have been trying to indicate. Practical 
faith is not dogmatic speculation, and practical 
faith is satisfied with positives ; only the vain 
striving after a comfortable assurance has 
created the dogmatic negatives of theology, 
which have rarely been anything but a curse 
to the Church. Positives are nearly always 
right ; negatives are often wrong ; so let us 
beware. 

Let us, then, affirm what God is, and what 
Christ is, and get on with the work of the 
world. God asks nothing more than positive 
obedience ; He does not ask from us anathemas, 
as the Church too often has ; He asks us 
to follow Christ, and in our own hearts we 
hear the call. Speculation is a luxury usually, 
and often a waste of time. When a certain 



IS IT FINAL ? 123 



man of the Gospel record tried it regarding 
the final number of the elect — '' Are there 
few that be saved ? " — Christ's only answer 
was the seemingly inconsequent warning against 
being misled by talkers — " See that no man 
deceive you " ; and I think God's voice says 
the same to us to-day. Speculation has its 
rights, even in theology ; but an emphasis 
upon speculation has usually led men astray 
out of the high roads of spiritual endeavour 
and concrete life into the curious questionings 
of gnosticism and theosophy, or the celestial 
mathematics of apocalyptic literature such as 
Daniel or Revelation. Spiritual energies get 
absorbed, as at Thessalonica and Colosse, in 
these bypaths of religion, and the most futile 
of books are eagerly read and digested, with 
no real gain in those things which matter in 
the eyes of God, such as love, and humility, 
and mutual service — the gifts which St Paul 
puts first in the Christian scale. 

FORM AND SPIRIT 

But, whatever we may say of the finality of 
the Christian faith in God given to us in Jesus 
Christ, one thing is certain — our form of that 
faith is not final. The intellectual progress 
of mankind and the intellectual progress of 
the Christian religion are alike marked by the 
scrapping of forms. Every age in measure 
fashions its own, and rejects past forms, that it 



124 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

may put the new wine of its own day into new 
bottles, lest both be lost. That is, our form is 
essentially provincial in place and time, and 
this is only another way of saying that it is 
not final nor universal. The test of uni- 
versality is a serious matter. Our form is not 
final chiefly because it is largely a European 
one. The East had a little to do with the 
beginnings of our faith, but only a little; 
we know it in a theological dress put together 
with infinite care and labour in the Western 
world. It has its special affinities with the 
East and other parts of the world, but these 
are yet largely to be discovered ; and w^e 
shall not have a universal faith intellectually 
till we have a universal faith geographically. 
Other races than ours, with their own special 
visions of God, and their own peculiar treasures 
of mind and spirit, must interpret our faith, 
both for their own sakes, and for ours, that it 
may become universal. 

But Christianity has in it the promise and 
potency of a universal dominion, tested and 
proved already in every quarter of the earth ; 
and such universality surely promises something 
very like finality ! A universal religion must 
be largely a final religion, and this finality 
Christianity seems to possess already very 
manifestly, though only potentially yet as 
regards some parts of the earth's surface. We 
need our Christian missionaries, and a universal 
Church, before we shall be able to proclaim 



IS IT FINAL ? 125 

truly a universal Christ and a universal faith 
in God. 

Again, we must, in dealing with this whole 
question, distinguish very clearly and firmly 
between form and life, between letter and 
spirit. In Christ we have a perfect spirit, 
a perfect life, a final faith in the imperfect 
vestments, social, historical, and intellectual, 
of a provincial Judaism and an apocalyptic 
peasant piety ; that is, we must penetrate 
beneath the clothes to the abiding reality for 
our final faith. This finality lies, and will lie, 
so far as our mind can conceive the problem 
and the future at all, in the moral finality of 
His spirit. This, interpreted or restated by 
the various lands of the earth in their own terms, 
will give us a universal and a final gospel, for 
which we must in this day labour hard, in 
view of the desperate international situation 
as regards war and economic exploitation ; 
things which are the antithesis of the spirit 
of Christ, and which can be met only by that 
spirit when it has been understood, appreci- 
ated and assimilated. 

This moral finality of the spirit of Jesus 
Christ for the future is supported by the past 
history of Christianity. The faith of Christ, 
embodied socially in the Church, intellectually 
in Christian theology, and morally in the 
institutions of Christendom, has shown an 
extraordinary power of adaptation and assimi- 
lation similar to that of all true life. Every 



126 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

age of Christianity has lived its own life, and 
the forms of that life have varied enormously. 
Again and again the Church has changed its 
form or appearance, but in varying forms the 
one gospel, the one life and the one spirit 
have remained, to break out anew in days 
of degradation and stagnation. The Church 
has reached depths of infamy and moral 
humiliation almost unknown to secular organisa- 
tions, it has been paganised at times out of 
all recognition, but it has survived by virtue 
of something in it, some holy thing fundamental 
to it, the spirit and life of Jesus Christ dwelling 
in a remnant, often obscure in the eyes of men, 
but the link of life with the great days when 
the Son of Man walked our earth. In the 
Church, then, we have the evidence of a real 
and perpetual life in spite of all men's attempts 
to submerge it in things evil and deadly ; and 
this life is a presage of its own immortality, of 
its own finality in spirit, if not in form. 

Another point, already alluded to, which 
supports the idea of finality in some form for 
the Christian faith is its power of universal 
appeal, proved so often on the mission field. 
Our early forefathers in these islands felt its 
appeal as surely as the South Seas or China of 
to-day. The gospel needs a certain amount of 
translation in every country, not only into the 
local language, but into local forms of thought ; 
yet in spite of this local variation in its state- 
ment, the same gospel substantially as first 



IS IT FINAL ? 127 

blessed the world in Christ's teaching has sub- 
stantially the same appeal to a human nature, 
which, for all our progress or other changes, is 
substantially the same as in apostolic days ; and 
our Gospel, or good news, is the conception of 
God which Christ revealed, and in the power of 
which He lived. Out of different racial and 
national types, separated in forms of thought 
and practice, there is emerging everywhere one 
Church, united in the fundamentals of the 
Christian faith, however diverse at the circum- 
ference of its life. Does not the universality 
of the appeal of our Gospel strengthen our 
conception of its finality ? In Christ's thought 
of God, and in the spirit of Christ Himself, 
all races of men are finding the solutions of 
their individual and social needs ; and never 
was this fact more evident than it is to-day. 
The satisfying moral revelation for mankind 
as we know it has been, and is being, found in 
Christ ; does not this argue finality as in some 
sense a reasonable belief, even if not logically 
demonstrable ? 

But let us remember that, going outside 
the spiritual and ethical' sphere, w^e must not 
look to Christ as a revelation intended to 
supersede, and make of none effect, our own 
thinking and feeling, and our own struggles 
after better forms of life ; intellectually and 
aesthetically Christ is not our final revelation, 
though His spirit is our greatest help tow^ards 
the attainment of an ever greater truth and 



128 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

beauty. And if in these spheres of mental 
activity Christ is not a final revelation, still 
less are our Scriptures so. The mission of 
Christ was not to forestall modern science, or 
literature, or art, but to show men the way to 
God, and to make effective that knowledge 
of the unseen in human experience. Within 
that realm we must acknowledge Him as the 
one luminous spot in the universe as we know 
it, as the central figure of all history, as our 
personal Saviour and Master in life. The 
forms of our life we must with toil fashion for 
ourselves, in theology, criticism, science, art, 
mechanics, and all other practical attempts 
to understand and apply our human under- 
standing to the world about us ; but the spirit 
of our life is from Him, a flame lit at His light, 
as we find it in the pages of our New Testament, 
and as we see it later in the experience of the 
true apostolic succession of Christ-like lives 
which adorn the ages intervening between the 
days of His flesh and ours. 



THE CHURCH AND PRACTICAL PROBLEMS 

Forms in life come and go, churches and 
religious movements wax and wane ; and to 
speak of the finality of Christianity does not 
imply a belief that the Church, as at present 
constituted and known to us, will survive. 
Indeed it will not survive the judgments of 
man or of history unless it be worthy and fit 



IS IT FINAL ? 129 

to do so, facing the challenges of each age, and 
conquering in the humility and power of the 
spirit of Christ. Nor does it imply a belief 
that the Christian conception of God as inter- 
preted by us will ultimately survive. In 
history the interpretations of God, even within 
the Church, have been many, Jewish, Greek, 
Latin, Teutonic, feudal, forensic, deist, pan- 
theist, despotic, sentimental, and so forth — 
none of them attaining to the fulness or depth 
of Christ's original interpretation, all local, 
ephemeral and partial things. Forms cannot 
give life ; only life can beget life ; therefore 
it is to the spirit, not to the letter, that we 
must look for our finality. Forms to-day 
are crumbling in every sphere, partly through 
their own senile decay, partly through the 
inbursting of new life. We must champion, 
not the forms, but the spirit, so far as we can 
differentiate the one from the other. 

The Church is in the testing ; '' every 
day is judgment day." Christianity, we say, 
has failed ; and we know that it is not Christ 
but Antichrist who has failed us, because 
we gave our lip service to Christ, and put our 
trust in Antichrist. The religious issues of 
the day are obvious and serious. Our gospel 
has failed only because it is not Christ's ; our 
individual religion has failed because it is not 
Christ's ; our social schemes have failed because 
they are not Christ's. We need to remake 
things more in harmony with the spirit of our 



130 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

Master ; intellectual restatement cannot be 
avoided ; social reconstruction and mission 
work on more Christian lines must be done. 
We need missionaries to the heathen abroad, 
and to the heathen at home ; men and women 
with a minimum of sentimental love for the 
past, and a maximum of practical interest in 
the present ; men and women with a justly 
low estimate of ecclesiastical methods, and a 
justly high enthusiasm for the methods of 
Christ. We even need missionaries to the 
Pharisees and Sadducees of the day ; men who 
will not only not scorn the souls of the poor, 
but who will not scorn even the souls of the 
rich and educated, as is the fashion of popular 
evangelism to-day, and an involuntary confes- 
sion of its own weakness ; men who will dare to 
think, and to think hard, for the world's sake, 
and who will win to the Church its twentieth 
century representatives of Joseph of Arimathea, 
Nicodemus, Barnabas, and Paul ; men who 
recognise the divine value of education, and 
the difficulties of the student, and who realise 
what a university student like a Saul of Tarsus 
can do for Christianity. 

Success at home has always gone with success 
abroad ; intensively and extensively the 
Kingdom grows simultaneously. Let us seek 
our own place, wherever in God's earth it 
may be, and let us be satisfied with nothing 
else. The gospel must be universal in every 
sense if it is to be final in any sense. We 



IS IT FINAL ? 131 

need to-day a greater zeal and enthusiasm to 
work for Christ ; we need a greater courage 
to realise in the hard cash of the Kingdom of 
God even such Christianity as we have got ; 
we need a greater humility to learn and accept 
truth from any quarter, whether Romanism, 
or Theosophy, or science, or any other living 
attempt to understand life ; and we need a 
greater devotion to dare things for God and 
man, to prove our faith to ourselves, and to 
commend it to others as reasonable, as necessary, 
and as true. 

I am not sure that this discussion has been 
very illuminating or helpful in its methods 
or results, but I have aimed at pointing out 
certain things of importance, ideas which 
are sometimes held by men, and which are not 
true, and ideas which are both fundamentally 
true, and practically effective and valuable, 
in our conception of Christ's finality for faith. 
I have endeavoured to show that there are 
absurd ideas of finality which no reasonable 
man, and no sincere follower of Christ, can 
hold, ideas which negate progress and our 
highest values in the interests of mental 
sloth, selfish comfort and assurance; and I 
have tried to show in what senses we can speak 
of Christ's gospel or thought of God as final, 
viz. : — in the first place, as possessing the 
finality of a universal religion, capable of 
appealing to, transforming, and uplifting all 
races and types of men, except perhaps the 
I* 



132 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

very few in Christian lands whose sophisti- 
cation for the present has been secured 
by the folly and dogmatism of half-edu- 
cated and half-hearted Christians, men whose 
warping lies largely at the door of official 
Christianity, and whose very rebellion has 
in it the seeds of a greater Christianity, 
when negatives shall, in a new atmosphere, 
have been changed into positives. And in 
addition to this present actual, and greater 
future, universality of our faith, we find in 
Christianity, in the second place, a spirit of 
an absolute kind, the spirit of Christ toward 
God and man and all things, which is in 
itself a perfect moral revelation. The spirit 
or attitude revealed in Jesus Christ, of a 
God-centred, self-denying life, is something 
which we can confidently speak of as final ; 
and in it we perceive the solution of all our 
problems, intellectual, aesthetic, social, inter- 
national, and the like ; for as surely as the will 
lies behind, and conditions, our external life 
of action and our inward life of thought, so 
surely does the will-transforming spirit of 
Christ condition all true progress. Modern 
science is a child of the sincerity and selfless 
love of truth which, in modern times, has been 
made effective by the example and spirit of 
Jesus Christ. If we will but drink of that 
spirit, and live within the circle of its influence 
and power, we shall have no fears or worries, 
hatreds, suspicions, or greeds, to sap the mind. 



IS IT FINAL? 133 

and undermine the fabric of our social and 
international life, but victory, peace, and 
harmony without and within. True health 
comes from within ; and the life of com- 
munion with God, meditation upon Him, 
and imitation of Him, is the life of individual 
and social health and well-being, physical,, 
moral, political, economic, and international. 

THE GOSPEL AND THE WORLd's NEED 

Our gospel is Jesus Christ, because our gospel 
is a thought of God to which Jesus Christ 
gave expression in life, in teaching, and in the 
abiding spirit and influence of His personality. 
For us Christ is the revelation, the measure, 
the interpreter of God, the Word made flesh ; 
and this gospel, of what God is and does, is for 
us made effective and concrete in the life of 
Jesus Christ by His trust. His dependence, 
His selfless interest in the Kingdom of God, 
His active love and humility. His freedom 
and courage in face of all circumstances, and 
in relation to all sorts and conditions of men. 
There, in His life and His teaching, we find 
our Christian conception of God both pro- 
claimed and incarnated ; it was the greatest 
of gifts, it is the precious inheritance of the 
Church visible or invisible. But what has 
it done for us ? It has done much ; but how 
little in comparison with what it might have 
done, had the Church been more faithful 



134 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

and more venturesome in its following of 
Christ ! Look at the position to-day ! We see 
around us the great international problems 
that spring from greed, suspicion, and pride, in 
the physical and moral wreckage of war, and 
the national money-grubbing which exploits 
weaker peoples for the advantage of the 
stronger ; we see the moral and social problems 
of our more domestic life, immorality, in- 
temperance, gambling, the futile waste of 
life and wealth in the pursuit of the dust 
and ashes of earth's selfish pleasures ; we see 
the industrial and economic strife of class with 
class, the clash of selfish interests, the bitterness 
of mutual suspicion, misunderstanding, and 
even hate, the refusal to subordinate private 
interests to the general good, and the belief 
in the divine right of present conditions, or 
the divine right of bloody revolution ; we see 
the absurd intolerance of political differences, 
and the refusal to face facts, or to admit in 
practice the brotherhood of man which we 
preach and profess ; — all these things contrary 
to the spirit of Christ, but many of them 
done in His name, and with the blessing of 
Christian churches, where the blind still so 
often lead the blind. Unfortunately, yet 
fortunately, Christ cannot be identified with 
His Church, or with any branch of it that 
I know. Science still challenges our faith 
in part, and often sincerely enough, because 
it does not understand. Art is in rebellion 



IS IT FINAL ? 135 

against a Christianity both misunderstood and 
misunderstanding. The earth is full of trouble 
and of problems. 

Look at our own city, depressed in trade, 
torn by ignorant factions who do not under- 
stand one another, nor wish to ; slipping 
down like other great cities into all manner 
of moral filth and impotence ; with a waning 
church-going population, and a tremendous 
growth of gambling, and of all kinds of useless 
or harmful ways of spending the time that is 
so short, and the money that is so scarce ; 
with few seemingly caring much for things 
beyond bread and butter, hoary antipathies, 
and sensual pleasures ! Does it not need 
Christ to heal its wounds ? The spirit of 
Christ would lead us to ignore our political 
differences, our inherited dislikes, and to care 
for one another as children of one God and 
Father ; it would lift us to a worthier life, 
to a truer prosperity which no trade depression 
could destroy, to a better enthusiasm and 
purpose in life and in the use of life's coinage, 
material or hum.an. The Protestant must 
learn to love and think for, to appreciate and 
work alongside, his Roman Catholic neighbour, 
or he is crucifying afresh the Son of Man — 
and vice versa of course, but at the moment 
I am speaking only to Protestants. Political 
differences on either side are insuificient to 
excuse a lack of the love which Christ brought, 
and which knows no limits of place, or interest. 



136 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

or political creed. And so with our other 
problems. We must, in a word, follow Christ 
— not worship Him by keeping the thought of 
Him for certain days or places, not abstractly 
debate or champion His theoretical finality — 
but follow Him, and apply practically the faith 
we have learned from Him. I know well we 
shall not feather our nests in this generation 
by following Christ ; but we shall do work 
worthy of our manhood and of our Christian 
calling, and we shall find the pearl of great 
price in the truest sense. We have the one 
life to live here, the one death to die ; can we 
be satisfied to take the popular line of least 
resistance, and to pass out of the world amid 
the applause of timid and ignorant men to 
meet the rebuke of God ? Must we not try 
to please Him alone, and not men, whatever 
be the price, and however our work may be 
criticised, or scoffed at, or imperilled ? God 
seen in Christ is, I believe, the one solution 
of all these our troubles ; but it needs brave 
hearts and honest minds to apply it to life. 
Communion with God as known in Christ, 
venture upon God as preached by Christ, 
imitation of God as practised by Christ — these 
are the true Christian life. Such a life will 
not be easy, but it will be satisfying, and it will 
be worthy of those whom God has called into 
His Kingdom by Christ Jesus. The true finality 
for us of our faith in God is, that it is the 
solvent of all the difficulties before us, the 



IS IT FINAL ? 137 

answer to all the needs around us ; let us get 
on with the work of its application to life, and 
leave the speculation and the difficulties, 
theoretical and practical, with God. We 
have the clue to the labyrinth in our hands ; 
it is enough. " Keep Thou my feet. I do 
not ask to see the distant scene ; one step 
enough for me." Let us live a moment 
at a time in the spirit of Christ, and in the 
power of the Father whom He trusted. 



CONCLUSION 

In these addresses I have sought to show, 
in the first place, that it is reasonable to believe 
in God as Christ preached Him and believed 
on Him ; reasonable to believe that He is 
one, rather than to accept the so-called 
atheism or agnosticism, but the actual poly- 
theism, of modern unbelief, with its acceptance 
of a multitude of unsystematised principles, 
values, powers, and the like ; reasonable to 
believe in His being. His personality. His 
goodness. His Fatherhood, His perfection and 
all-sufficiency, otherwise we discover our own 
actual or potential superiority to God, and 
invert our whole universe : and I have tried 
to point out in this connection the true relation 
between Christ and our faith in God, as making 
of Christ the mediator between God and 
man, the measure or interpreter of the unseen. 
I have sought, in the second place, to show^ 



138 OUR FAITH IN GOD 

that the conception of God given us by Christ 
satisfies, and is necessary to satisfy, our thought, 
our aspirations, our spiritual, moral and physical 
needs, necessary for health of body, mind and 
soul, and necessary to the best life as fulfilling 
the true ideals of the gentleman or the sports- 
man : and in this connection I have tried to 
make clear the issues between the true Christi- 
anity and that subtle paganism of our time 
w^hich so often masks itself behind vague 
popular phrases and powerful popular passions 
or sentiments. I have sought, in the third 
place, to show that this faith in God through 
Jesus Christ is effective in practical life, that 
it works when actually tested, whether by 
Christ Himself, or the apostolic community, 
or by the martyrs and saints of the ages, or 
by ordinary men and w^omen like ourselves ; 
but I have tried to emphasise the view that a 
true faith will not merely ask, but venture, 
and that only in venture will real satisfaction 
and assurance be found : and in this con- 
nection I have tried to point out that wrong 
ideas of God will not, and cannot, work, 
and how greatly we need to discriminate 
between the true and the false in our thought 
of God, testing all things by the mind that 
was in Christ. And, finally, I have sought 
to show that this conception of God, given in 
and through Christ, is enough, and more than 
enough, for us to proceed with as the solution 
of all our problems, being not only the best 



IS IT FINAL ? 139 

we know, but the best we can conceive. Its 
finality lies in its potential universality, and 
in the spirit of Jesus Christ through which it 
found, and finds, expression. Not the forms 
but the spirit abides, and continual restate- 
ment and missionary work are both essential 
to its true finality and its ultimate victory, 
and to its actual power in any age or environ- 
ment. We must live our faith ; there is no 
alternative for a living Church. 

And so we come back to our faith in God, 
and to the need of venture upon it in all spheres 
of human life. The great need of man in- 
dividually and socially is God, not the name 
but the reality, the personal, loving, all- 
sufficient life behind all things, and seeking 
expression in them, above all in men and 
women. And to make this reality of God 
effective for man we must consciously accept 
it, venture upon it, and minister our gospel 
to the world as a living and tested fact. There 
I leave our study of these great things. 

And now to the King eternal, immortal, 
invisible, the only wise God, be honour 
and glory for ever and ever. 

Amen. 



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